Alums Get Public Service Sentence

Two Harvard graduates among a group of highly educated Black radicals were sentenced yesterday in Manhattan's Federal District Court to three months of community service on charges of possessing weapons and using false identification.

Roger Wareham '72 and Coltrane Chimerenga, who got a master's degree from the Education School in 1969, are two of the seven defendants in the highly publicized case. The seven will return to court on January 16 for final sentencing, when the judge will rule on the Justice Department's request that all go to jail.

On August 5, the seven were found guilty of the weapons charges, but acquitted of conspiring to commit armed robberies and to free two radicals serving prison sentences involving a 1981 Brink's armored-car robbery in Rockland County, N.Y. Two policemen and a guard were killed in the robbery.

None of the seven was charged with actually committing a crime.

Wareham, Chimerenga and the five other co-defendants and their spouses hold a total of 10 college and six graduate degrees. They were under surveillance by the FBI for more than a year when agents arrested them in October 1984 and found an arsenal of weapons--including sawed-off shotguns and Uzi machine guns--at several members' houses.

The government prosecutors maintained that the seven planned to commit the crimes and had even rehearsed armed robberies. But the defendants said they were being prosecuted merely for their politics and for their community activisim in the Brooklyn and Queens neighborhoods where they live.

"[We are] not just Black, but articulate and thinking and active and revolutionary," Wareham told New York magazine in a May interview. "We talk about the legitimacy of armed struggle, of armed self-defense, so if they had a composite nightmare, we probably represented that."

Chimerenga came to Harvard in 1968 when the Graduate School of Education offered him a scholarship. In that same year, Wareham entered as a freshman after attending Horace Mann High School in the Bronx. After graduating cum laude from Harvard, he went to Columbia University Law School.

As an undergraduate, Wareham worked to institute the Afro-American studies program. Wareham first met Chimerenga at a 1968 meeting of 200 Black students on campus, which Chimerenga organized to unify the various Black organizations.