Despite the seeming advances made by minorities in the U.S. over the past three decades, the public needs to be educated about the serious racial divisions that still exist in American society, a leading activist for racial equality said yesterday.

Speaking to a group of more than 120 in Memorial Hall, the Rev. Charles R. Stith said that society needs to instill racial consciousness in all citizens at every level.

"You've got to insist that we make the teaching of the respect of racial diversity a required course from pre-school to graduate school," said Stith, who in 1985 founded the Organization for a New Equality (ONE). "It ought not be an option."

Stith delivered his comments at a picnic sponsored by Actively Working Against Racism and Ethnocentrism (AWARE), a College group which promotes racial tolerance on campus.

Although the event was originally slated to be held in the Radcliffe Quadrangle, rainy weather forced the group to relocate to Memorial Hall.

Stith, a 1979 graduate of the Divinity school who has worked in Boston-area churches for the past 11 years, warned the picnickers of ongoing racial polarization. He cited the 1989 murder of Yusef Hawkins in Bensonhurst, N.Y., and the letter bombs recently sent to NAACP offices as examples of a "racist terrorism" which is becoming more and more common.

He also pointed to the success of Louisiana legislator David Duke, a former grand wizard in the Ku Klux Klan who recently lost to Democrat J. Bennett Johnston in a campaign for the U.S. Senate.

"It is an obscenity in 1990 that somebody who spews that kind of hate, avarice and anger can get 44 percent of the vote in any state of this country," Stith said.

Stith also attacked President Bush for his threats this summer to veto the Civil Rights Bill of 1990 and for drawing on latent racist tendencies in his campaign for the presidency.

"George Bush understood America's gullibility around the issue of race. You think Dan Quayle was Bush's running mate? It was Willie Horton," Stith said referring to a much-publicized ad campaign focusing on a Black convict who raped a white woman while on furlough from prison.

The scene was set for Stith's comments by a 30-foot-wide "graffiti wall," plastered with brown paper sheets on which students had made anonymous comments about race relations at Harvard.

Most students who took pen to paper were supportive of AWARE's efforts, but some expressed discontent at being unfairly labelled racists.

"I'm so tired of people assuming that I'm prejudiced just because I'm white," one student wrote.

After Stith's speech members of several minority groups spoke to the crowd, emphasizing the theme of tolerance.

Although most of the speakers followed traditional modes of address, members of the Asian American Association made their remarks in a rap song to calling for more minority faculty at Harvard.

"We wanted to express ourselves through another group's unique medium," said member David Shim '91.