Mass Gathering at Boston Common Will Protest Birmingham Arrests

On Sunday at 3 p.m. a mass rally will be held in the Boston Common, dramatizing the situation in Birmingham, Alabama, and petitioning Governor Peabody and the state legislature to speak out on the integration issue. The Civil Rights Co-ordinating Committee hopes that 300 Harvard students will march from the Cambridge Common at 1 p.m. and join the demonstration in front of the state capitol building.

Plans for the demonstration originated in the home of a Roxbury minister last Sunday. On Monday, Noel Day, director of the St. Mark Social Center and a member of the Boston Action Group, spoke at a meeting of CRCC members and sympathizers in Quincy House, asking them to help organize the student community behind the effort.

The rally now has a broad organizational base. It is supported by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, the Boston Action Group, the Congress of Racial Equality, the Episcopal Society for Cultural and Social Unity, the Student Non-violent Coordinating Committee, the Civil Rights Coordinating Committee, the American Veterans Committee, the St. Mark Social Center and the Jewish Labor Committee. Groups at Harvard which support the movement include the United Ministry, the Harvard Young Republicans, the Harvard Young Democrats, Tocsin, and the Harvard-Radcliffe Liberal Union.

Participating students are expected to me from Harvard, Radcliffe, M.I.T., union University, Brandeis University, Boston College and Simmons College, students will meet at the Cambridge Common at 1 p.m. and march down Massachusetts Avenue, past M.I.T., over the Harvard Bridge, and on to the Boston Common. There they will meet thousands of Roxbury residents who are expected to be present.

In Roxbury, a slum community inhabited by roughly 60,000 Negroes, an intensive publicity campaign is operating to draw people to the demonstration. A sound truck is patrolling the area, leaflets are being distributed, spot radio announcements are being made hourly over the radio by local church officials, and ministers have agreed to announce the mass gathering in their morning services.

According to the New York Times, 100 similar demonstrations will be held in cities across the country.