Antiwar Group Plans for Spring: Will Link Peace to Social Issues

An informal coalition trying to forge a common attack on both the war and social injustice announced a three-pronged spring offensive for continuous action last night at the Old Baptist Church on Mass. Ave.

A drive to implement "a people's peace treaty between the Vietnamese and the American people" will start on February 5 at Ann Arbor, Michigan, Jay Craven, president of the B. U. student body, said last night.

On April 2-4, the coalition will join with the National Welfare Rights Organization, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and the United Farm Workers in as yet unspecified actions to commemorate the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr.

In addition, the groups are calling for "a week of local and regional actions during the first week of May, the national focus of which will probably be on May 5 in Washington for clear militant, non-violent acts of civil disobedience," according to Louise Peck, one of the meeting's speakers.

The group grew out of four meetings held by Sydney Peck, co-founder of the National Mobilization to End the War, which attempted to "define a multi-issue, multi-tactic coalition with responsiveness to both peace and social issues."

Yesterday's meeting, attended by over 200, was called by the several groups to report on the results of its Peace Conference held in Chicago on January 8-10, and to discuss the indictment of the Harrisburg Six for allegedly conspiring to kidnap Presidential assistant Henry A. Kissinger '50.

Howard Zinn, professor of political science at B. U., called the indictments "an attempt by the government-to the extent that it thinks out these things rationally-to put antiwar movement in a defensive position. The government is trying to hurt, cripple,destroy the antiwar movement."

Craven said that while he was on a National Student Association trip to Hanoi, the president of the Supreme Court of North Vietnam told him that "due to the chemical warfare of the Americans, a South Vietnamese woman who drank a half quart of water from river was six times more likely to have her baby born deformed than a mother who had lived through Hiroshima."

All speakers stressed that this informal coalition was an attempt to broaden the middle-class orientation of the antiwar movement to encompass blacks and workers.