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PLAYBOY - ” . ros 600 active members on several campuses -—is the May 2nd Movement, an out- Browth of ihe May 2nd Committee formed ata socialist conference at Yale in March 1964. Its name comes from the fact thaton May 2nd of that year, the Move- ment organized a march on the United Nations, protesting the war in Vietnam. Like the DuBois Clubs, the May 2nd activists Consider what they term “Amer- ican imperialism” their primary target. Admitting fréquent. informal ties with the Progressive Labor Party, May 2nd leaders deny they have been taken over by the PLP. They call their nascent or- ginization “a radical student peace or- ganization,” but they are not pacifists, “We cannot,” says one of their leaders, “ask the Vietcong or the black people in’ Northern ghettos to be nonviolent. Oh. I used to be a pacifist, but I never had to try it out. However, a Vietnamese peasant confronted by a Marine or a black man being hit by a cop cannot he asked to be nonviolent. Pacifism is irrel- evant for them.” Oldline, anti-Communist leftists such ws Sectalist Norman Thomas and Bayard Rustin, chief strategist: for Martin Lu- ther King, condemn the overt commu. AS RENT CCITT IS EAT SLOWLY ow, oe SLE FOOD WELL = on ~ERE AND CHEW YouR: We're Happeniag Al! Uver ntinned from page 98) nism of the PLP; and they consider the DuBois Clubs and the May 2nd Move- ment as at best potitically naive and at Worst easy prey to manipulation — by Communists. SDS,SNCC and the North- ern Student Movement resent the im- plication chat they can be successfully infiltrated. They will cooperate with the DuBois Chibs ‘nnd the May 2nd Move- ment—though not with the rigid, raucous PLP—on specific projects, maintaining their own stubborn independence. Since ’ they practice total inner democracy and have no patience with pat ideologies, whether Soviet or Chinese, they are con- fident they can protect themselves. On one occasion, a PLP member infiltrated a SNCC unit in the South, be- coming editor of that group's local news- ptper. When the paper begun io look as if it had been programed by a computer in Peking, the journalistic James Bond of the PLP was dismissed, “Look.” says C. Clark Kissinger, a short, wiry. 21-vear-old graduate of the Univer- sity of Chicago (where he majored in mathematics) and now a tull-time strate- gist for SDS. “we began by rejecting the okd sectarian Left and its ancient quar- rels. We are interested in direct ucuion Ob Se SES S82 1 specific issues. We do cndless Soviet Russia.” In agreement with Kissinger jis 28. year-old Bill Serickland, a tall, dim, per- NOt spei.:! hours debating the nature of vasively hip Negro who directs the Northern Student: Movement from an office in’ Harlem. A magna cium laude graduate of Harvard who wrote his Whee. ter's thesis on Malcolm X, Strickland speaks for the majority of today’s radical American young when he insists: “What. ever ‘revolution’ does occur will be an American revolution, coming ont of the American experience. We'll have to evolve our own idcology. You can’t im- pose an alien ideology in the United States. We're not interested ina guy's memorizing Trotsky's theory of pernia- nent revolution or in some Stalinist with a line. We're interested in creating new forms and new institutions.” “Mane adds a member of SNCC. “the Communists, they're empty, man. cmpry, They've got the same stale ideas, the same bureaucracy they've always had. When he gets mixed up with us, a Com- mic dies and a person develops.” The Northern Student Movement—- the SNC of the North—was formed in 1961.) Manned largely by college stu. dents. some of whom dropped out of school for a time to work in the field, the NOM at first concentrated on tutor: al programs for children in Negro slums, Th the last year, its focus has changed to helping the poor—the black poor—orgin- ize themselves into power blocs. With some 2000 student members on 73 campuses, the Northern Student Movement has 32 field secretaries and 410° full-time volunteer workers. Now nearly all in the field are Negro. En- gaged in community organizing in Bos. ton. Hartford. Detroit. Philadelphia and _ Harlem. they are acting as catalysts for rent strikes, political action, pressure on War-on-Poverty officials to enlist the poor in decision making, and otherwise as stimuli for the previously voiceless to join forces, “We fo way bevond voter registration,” says Strickland. “What's the point of Setting people registercd: so that they're swallowed by the same old mechanistic political machines: Were engaged i creating new political strue- tures for a really new society.” A switch to politics is also a mitjor part of the new direction being aiken by CORE. Formerly, CORE concentrated its cnergics on civil rights breakthroughs —from public accommodations to job but now. CORE's former national director, James Farmer, emphasizes, “our goal is power. political power” (see When Will the Demonstrations End?, piaysoy, Jan. nary 1966. and Mood Ebony, PLAYBOY, February 1966). One reute to that power is the OPENING Of tare denne cece ‘ |