Few Answer Afro's Call For a Boycott of Classes

Few students responded yesterday to Afro's call for a one-day boycott of classes protecting the deaths of two students at Southern University. Baton Rouge (SUBR) last Thursday.

But Students for a Democratic Society endorsed Southern University strikers' request for another one-day-solidarity strike next Monday. Afro was to meet last night to plan further actions.

Yesterday's boycott was hardly noticeable in many classes, with some students attributing what lowered attendance there was to the imminence of Thanksgiving rather than the strike.

Memorial Service

There will be a memorial service for the dead SUBR students today at noon in Memorial Church. The bell will toll and the Kuumba singers, who performed outside Massachusetts Hall during its occupation last Spring, will sing.

Though some picketers tried to hold discussions in classrooms between lectures, yesterday's main action at Harvard was a 1 p.m. rally outside Widener Library. About 70 demonstrators heard Steven C. Pitts '74 read Afro's strike call before moving to Mass Hall, where they picketed and played a tape of the speech of Alma Coleman, an SUBR student who spoke at Sunday night's strike meeting.

About 200 people attended the rally at MIT last night.

The desultory protest was part of a nationwide pattern, Columbia University radicals claimed a victory because black and white leftists in organizing a boycott, but few students actually struck. The largest rally was probably the one at the University of Wisconsin, where 800 students demonstrated outside the Capital building.

La Organizacton an organization of Puerto Rican students at Harvard issued a statement last night "uniting ourselves with our Black brothers in condemning the killing of two students at Southern University Baton Rouge."

Brian L. Mendis '75, an SDS member said last night that "we certainly hope" for a larger response to next Monday's boycott. "It'll definitely be more organized," he said