Friends of the late Mark de Wolfe Howe have made an anonymous $100,000 gift to Miles College in Birmingham, Ala. to memorialize the former Harvard professor's interest in civil rights.

The donors earmarked the money for the freshman studies program which Dean Monro will direct when he joins the Miles faculty next year.

Monro, serving as a consultant on General Education, helped develop the program over the last three summers. Its primary goal is to keep the "gifted non-achiever" from dropping out of school, Lucius H. Pitts, Miles president, said last night.

Miles, a non-accredited Negro school, has a 25 per cent annual drop-out rate because of inadequate high school training. To combat this, Monro has designed a special course of studies for freshmen, with emphasis on small classes and intensive counseling. But the program is just getting off the ground.

"This [the gift] will be a tremendous boost," Monro said last night. Pitts was less restrained in his enthusiasm. He said the $100,000 was "like sunshine to flowers, windows to a house."

It will "underwrite the foundation of the program, which until now has been progressing on faith and hope alone," he said.

Pitts assumed that "the stature and competence of Monro" had attracted the gift to Miles. The gift, he said, was an appropriate memorial to Howe, in view of his interest in Negro education. "Howe might have been descended from New England families who were active in the underground railway in earlier times," he said of Howe's interest in civil rights.

Howe's Support

"Besides his significant contributions in the South, Howe encouraged people around here who worked in civil rights," Monro added. "He was a stout support to those people."

Howe, former Charles Warren professor of American Legal History, died Feb. 28. He was a founder of the Lawyer's Constitutional Defense Committee, which provides legal assistance in civil rights cases. He spent the summer of 1965 in Mississippi trying cases for the Committee.

Two Sums

The gift is being made in two $50,000 sums. The college has received notification of the first grant, which is for the academic year 1967-68. The second grant, for 1968-69, will follow in a year.

Monro will resign as Dean of Harvard College on July 1 to assume the title director of freshman studies at Miles college.