Day Complains of Rights Stagnation, Demands Total Overhaul of Society

The Civil Rights movement must radically change its strategy and broaden its goals in order to survive, Noel Day insisted last night, winning a standing ovation from an enthralled audience in Emerson Hall.

"We have regressed," Day stated, citing figures showing more Negroes unemployed and poorly housed now than in 1954.

Speaking with no prepared text, the independent candidate for Congress from Boston's ninth district claimed that the civil rights movement must become a human rights movement, concerned not only with the specific problems of the Negro but with the plight of all of America's alienated.

Day proclaimed the need for a peacetime economy with increased welfare agency spending designed to remove people from the welfare dole by training them in jobs which cannot be automated.

The country's power elite--in politics, religion, education, business, and labor--must somehow be overcome, Day stated, before the country can became a "society based on humanity, ordered on love and respect for all men." "Every institution of our society has taught us to believe in racial superiority, and the value of the separation and subordination of large numbers of men."

"Overthrow Your Fathers"

"Some of your fathers may be among the decision makers," Day told his almost completely white audience, "The Problem is to overthrow your fathers."

Under specific fire from Day were President Johnson and "his supposedly liberal" administration. Terming the Civil Rights and Poverty Bills, "crumbs to the alienated," Day warned that Johnson's "broad party of consensus" threatens the civil rights movement with the same failure by inclusion which he feels has befallen American labor.

Day was especially critical of Hubert Humphrey's part in the stifling of the efforts of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic National Convention. According to Day, Humphrey threatened delegates who showed any indication to seat the "Mississippi sharecroppers" with loss of political offices and prestige