'Our Own Risk'

To the Editors of the Crimson:

Attending the December 3 service by Bishop Desmond Tutu at Memorial Church took me back to two events of my undergraduate years. In 1963, I was part of the August 28 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, the famous "I Have a Dream" march. Later that year, Reverend Martin Luther King conducted a Sunday service at Mt. Holyoke College, to which a student friend invited me. I had grown up in North Carolina, but with "Yankee" parents, so, from junior high school on I was able to see the significance of the growing struggle for equality in the South. I could recognize the injustice of separate, and always unequal, facilities--the two sets of water fountains and public restrooms--but they laid racist foundations in my young mind ones which, like all whites in this society. I have not yet fully eradicated. Hearing Dr. King on those two occasions did more than any other event of my youth to aid in that eradication.

It is perhaps that which was most recalled to me by Bishop Tutu's remarks. Both Tutu and King impressed the listener with their moral certitude that the existing order was unjust, and their faith that injustice can be changed by moral actions of individuals--their common Christian conviction. In those years, it was common to hear the protest of the southern white. "But you can't legislate love." Presumably few expected to see the South come spontaneously into a state of perfect Christian love and then integrate of its own volition. Yet, in the few short years since the Civil Rights Act of 1964, the South has changed more than in the previous century. Love may still elude many southern (and northern) whites in their dealings with blacks. Perhaps respect is even still wanting. But, for all the remaining injustices, equality stands now at least dimly in view. We are a changed people; the South is a different country.

So it was with discomfort that I listened to Bishop Turu's descriptions of the horrors of apartheid--discomfort and shame that Harvard can deliver to the Bishop an inscribed tribute while maintaining its investment policy. It recalls that southern hypocrisy of a generation ago, not Harvard's "pursuit of truth." The premise that pursuit of truth indeed leads to justice is one of the foundations of Western civilization, however often ignored or given only lip service. Is it necessary to repeat former South African Prime Minister Verster's statement that "each trade agreement, each bank loan, each new investment is another brick in the wall of our continued existence?" Or Tutu's "Either you are for or against apartheid, and not by rhetoric."

If the policy of constructive engagement were a route to justice and equality, the structures of apartheid would be eroding, not rigidifying. Perhaps divestiture, like integration in the South, cannot bring love. But it should be clear that, by withdrawing Harvard's support from this injustice, justice will be served. If Harvard continues to ignore this, it will be, in Tutu's words, "to your own risk." Lawrence C. Hager '66