A Stillness in Cambridge

For several weeks in June and July the town of Cambridge on the Eastern Shore of Maryland was the nation's most violent arena of racial conflict. Far worse violence was forestalled in Cam bridge only because National Guardsmen occupied the town and put it under martial law. When the Guardsmen withdrew for a few days in early July, disorder quickly erupted again.

Last week racial peace came to Cambridge, at least temporarily. At the urging of Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy, white and Negro leaders sat down together at the Justice Department in Washington and, in eight hours of negotiation, worked out a peace pact. Under that pact, the first four grades of Cambridge schools will be desegregated by September, and applications to any grade in any public school will be "processed without regard to race, creed or color." Also, city officials will apply to the Federal Housing Administration for help in obtaining low-rent housing "that will materially benefit the Negro community." Said Bobby Kennedy: "This is not a victory or a defeat for anybody. It is an effort to get Cambridge back together."

In other cities, too, in Charleston, S.C., Savannah, Ga., Gadsden, Ala., racial strife receded as whites and Ne groes tried to resolve their conflicts at negotiating tables instead of in the streets. The ugliest racial disorders of the week, ironically, occurred in New York, the great melting pot, a city of minorities, a city that years ago enacted laws forbidding discrimination in housing and employment. Negro demonstrators protesting job discrimination in the construction industry marched and picketed, knelt in the mud at construction sites, sat in front of bulldozers, singing

"We shall not be moved." At one construction site in Brooklyn, demonstrators chained themselves together to prevent the police from hauling them away. The cops had to cut the chains with huge shears (used to remove handcuffs when the key is missing) before they could take the demonstrators off to jail. Despite hundreds of arrests, Negro leaders vowed that the demonstrations would go on.

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