San Francisco Community Relations Council Hits Violence at State College

The Jewish Community Relations Council, in its first statement on the student revolt at San Francisco State College has called on the Jewish community to “support those student goals which are just” but at the same time, to “condemn any violence or disruption of democratic process committed in the pursuit of even those just goals.” The student body, largely Negro, has demanded, and received a Black studies program and is also demonstrating for greater participation in college policy making. The campus erupted with violence on several occasions.

The Community Relations Council conceded that the stance it advocated was “difficult” to hold. “It is much easier to be polarized into either a rejection of the goals because of the methods – or an acceptance of the methods because of the goals. Either pole spells disaster of a kind with which the Jewish community has had tragic experience. Some of the worst, most de-humanizing tyrannies imposed on man in modern history have been attached to legitimate human problems. Even Hitler came to power on a program calling for an end to the poverty and indignity of a starving and degraded German people. But good men as well as evil can be caught in the same trap. To abandon the democratic process, in whatever cause, is to start down the road to brutality.”