Offering strong opinions on the Black middle class, white corporate America and the Nation of Islam, four panelists discussed Black power last night before more than 120 students at Harvard Hall.

Last night's speakers were strongly critical of some aspects of the Black community. One charged Black churches with being out of touch with the poor, while others criticized the Black middle class and said too few Black people are involved in technical fields.

"We're pathetic in society," D. Dayneen Preston, an executive manager at Chase Manhattan Bank in New York, said in perhaps the evening's most critical comments. "We are some lazy people."

The panel discussion, "Black Power: Political, Economic and Spiritual Roads to the Empowerment of the African-American Community," was sponsored by the Black Students Association (BSA). BSA President Kristen M. Clarke '97 organized it.

The discussion featured: Thomson Professor of Government Martin L. Kilson Jr.; Alex Hurt, a first-year student at the Harvard Divinity School; Preston; and Carl Washington, a Los Angeles minister.

Kilson began the panel with sharp criticism of America's Black churches.

"They don't leverage their upper class resources on the behalf of empowerment," said Kilson, the first Black full professor to teach at Harvard.

He said Black churches do not use their financial resources to benefit Black communities. "Did you ever see the figures on how much, annually, they take in?" he asked.

"We have to 'young-bloodize' the church," Kilson said in an interview following the discussion last night. "We need to put some fire under the church."

Kilson said the Black middle class must find "some way to get the new capital of the new, bourgeois Black America into the process of exporting egalitarian progress for the weakest of us."

Hurt argued that many Black intellectuals lack "cultural legitimacy."

"Poor Black people see Black middle-class people as one, apathetic to who they are, and two, apathetic to what they are," he said. "Black folks who haven't been in the 'hood look at the people in the academy and say, 'You're not doing enough.'"

Hurt, who is working toward his master's degree in theological studies, said Blacks lacked both "a technical class" and enough people devoted to the cause of Black empowerment.

He said Black students at Ivy League schools often fail to return and help their communities.

"They want to come to Harvard, Yale, Princeton so they can get out of the 'hood, not so they can make avenues that lead back into the 'hood," he said. "Do they owe anything to the hood or is it every person for himself?"