MDC engineers decided to shorten the underpass under Boylston St. by about 20 feet, and the Commission voted to replant upstream the 19 sycamores due to be removed during construction of the underpass. Opponents of the underpasses have challenged the accuracy of the MDC claims, however.
Charles W. Eliot II '20, professor of City and Regional Planning, noted the MDC had claimed the number of trees to be destroyed would be reduced by 18. After examining the modified blueprints, Eliot said the old plans called for the destruction of 95 trees; under the new plans 117 trees (42 sycamores and 74 maples) will be transplanted or destroyed.
The MDC had also said that 11,500 square feet of park land would be saved under the new plans. While not contesting this claim, Eliot noted that the underpasses are planned to be 52 feet wide. Memorial Drive is only 40 feet wide at present, and Eliot expressed concern that the underpasses were only a prelude to a widening of the entire length of the Drive.
The South
In the South, and Mississippi in particular, Harvard students were being arrested and beaten up at an alarming rate throughout the summer months. Trouble struck first in Selma, Alabama. James W. Wiley, 2nd, '65 and three other SNCC workers were arrested on July 4 while testing the public accommodations section of the Civil Rights Law of 1964.
When a Harvard Summer News reporter called the sheriff's office in Selma, he was informed there was "no Mr. Wiley in jail here. We got a nigger named Wiley down here though. Is that who you mean?" The holiday weekend and the sheriff's delaying tactics kept Wiley and his co-workers in jail for close to a week.
Soon, however, the jailings and beatings became regular events. Even the Summer News sketchy news coverage reported several Harvard students arrested each week. Barry Goldstein '64 and two other COFO workers were arrested in Gulfport, Mississippi on July 9; the following day another Harvard student was arrested in Haddiesurg. Peter Orris '67 and Peter Cummings '65 received tastes of Mississippi justice in the middle of July. Orris was arrested with a crowd of 98 others during a Freedom Day in Greenwood, Miss. while Cummings was detained for a day for not having an inspection sticker on his car.
The Freedom house in Batesville, Miss., where Kathie Amatniek '64, L. Geoffrey Cowan '64, and Claude Weaver '65 were living, was bombed with tear gas on July 27. Fears that the tear gas attack was only a prelude to stronger action (as threatened in numerous phone calls to the house) proved unfounded.
Bickford Arrests
The long hot summer of 1964 seemed to have come to Cambridge on July 10 when a CORE-sponsored civil rights demonstration against the Hayes-Bickford's chain produced 27 arrests by the Cambridge police.
The arrests climaxed a long evening of CORE picketing at three different Bickford restaurants in Boston. In each location the group of 30 picketers succeeded in closing down the 24-hour a day cafeterias for a short period. But when the demonstratiors departed each Bickford reopened.
About 9 p.m. the pickets returned to the Cambridge cafeteria and continued to picket until 1 a.m. when the police ordered them to stop. The demonstrators refused to disperse and the police moved in.
The cases of all 27 arrested were dismissed two weeks later in Cambridge District Court, but the incident still received wide coverage in the South as small wire service stories were expanded for page one space.
Vorenberg Appointed
Midway through August, Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy '48 appointed James Vorenberg '49, professor of Law, to head a newly created Office of Criminal Justice. The general function of the new office will be to study and evaluate the effectiveness of the federal law system. Kennedy said he created the office to ensure that "the department over which I preside is more than a Department of Prosecution and is in fact a Department of Justice."
