In the Sunlight

Everyone poured into Soldiers' Field, and for the first time all the minorities could get in the sunlight and look at each other. At first the sight was not too pleasant--anyone there would have predicated at the beginning that darkness would find these thousands in chaos, each minority to go its own into the night.

But slowly, not easily, minorities began to move together. "No other group has worked so hard and so long with men so stubborn, so inefficient, and so stupid," Miles Link of Afro said near the beginning of the meeting. When he finished, most of the thousands made it clear that they believed him and would stand with Afro for its demands.

The chair read a resolution submitted by Alex Korns, a teaching fellow: "This body repudiates the right of the Harvard Corporation to close our University." The chair asked for ayes, and the roar that followed affirmed forever that those seven men we do not know and who do not know us could never again make such a threat.

"I personally want no negotiations," said Mark Roberts, a teaching fellow, at the loudspeakers later on. "There is no reason to send a negotiating team to Washington because there is nothing to negotiate about. There will be no contracts." And the cheer that followed later turned into a voice vote that said once and for all a majority--no longer a minority--of Harvard now saw that ROTC must go.

And then came the question of a strike. Three thousand people will not end the boycott of this place until all the demands passed at the meeting the end of ROTC and the others, are met. Three thousand others cannot yet make that strong a commitment or want no part of such a commitment.

All that makes no difference now. A majority of the people at Soliers' Fields came together at the end and decided to strike for at least three more days. The majority also saw that the work ahead demands that we work together, full time, in the day--and not just in fragmented groups isolated in the night.

So while we wait during the days of the strike, while we wait to see what those seven men say to us, we no longer have to worry about ourselves. We have seen each other in the daylight, and we are more together that anybody would have thought.