PROPHECY FULFILLED

To the Editors of The Crimson:

Five years after the University Hall bust and student strike at Harvard, I can appreciate the need for some leading participants in those upheavals to indulge in petty mythmaking. After all, the invention of a few colorful stories about martyrs, villains and dastardly deeds can liven up the historical record. Instead of the drab truth, they present us with history as a melodrama in which good guys line up against bad guys. More than that, myths can serve a useful social purpose. They help us to justify past revolutionary struggles and to raise present radical consciousness.

Nevertheless, as much as I can understand the motives for bending history a bit here and there, I have to admit I was disappointed to read the gross manhandling of the truth in one part of the Crimson story, "Strikers from '69: Five Years Later" (April 19, 1974). My former Social Studies tutee, Mark Dyen, is quoted telling a tale that is simply not true. In addition it is a gratutitous insult against several police officers who were acting quite responsible.

According to Dyen, a policeman was clubbing a student in the Yard during the bust. "A kid in a wheel chair, probably a friend of the guy being beaten, rolled up and pushed against the cop and told him to cut it out. The cop turned around and slammed the kid so hard he just sailed out of his wheel chair onto the ground."

I was there in Harvard Yard on that raw April morning in 1969. I was standing in front of the east doors of University Hall and I witnessed the "wheel chair episode" from beginning to end. The facts are quite different from Dyen's malicious fable.

Near the end of the bust when the police were taking students out of the building, a student in a wheel chair did appear coming along the path from Memorial Church. No one was near him; he was propelling his chair by himself in the direction of University Hall. I remember thinking he looked extremely agitated. His head was swaying from side to side and he was shouting loudly. Still with no person close to him, he swerved up to the space between University Hall and Thayer. I saw him pause and look around to see if anyone was watching. Then he began to scream. Slowly he pulled himself up from his chair, turned around, closed the arms of the chair with a bang, and pushed it over. Last of all, he threw himself headlong on the path with a great cry.

An instant later, I saw three policemen rush over to him. they bend over him and I heard them ask if he was hurt. The student next began to scream very loudly, "They are killing me. Stop them. Help me." He rolled around on the ground while the policemen watched.

"They are killing me. Stop them. Help me." He rolled around on the ground while the policemen watched.

Standing right next to me, a Boston police sergeant ordered two more men to go over and assist taking the student in the wheel chair away from the area. They did so. One picked up and fixed the collapsed chair. The other policemen picked up the student who was still screaming and placed him back in the wheel chair. They pushed it away over to the opposite side of Thayer. A moment later, the sergeant turned to me and said, "Well, that's over. But I'll bet we'll be accused tomorrow of clubbing a poor guy in a wheel chair."

The sergeant was right. I am sorry it had to be one of my students whose hallucinations fulfilled his prophecy. Richard M. Hunt   Associate Dean, GSAS