Down-to-Earth Idealism

Northern collegians have in recent years gone South on freedom rides, tried to integrate Louisiana lunch counters, been shot at for helping Negro voter registration in Georgia. Out of such idealistic activism, so strikingly missing in the apathetic '50s, has come a more down-to-earth student project. The newest task is tutoring thousands of Northern Negro children who lack the skill or the incentive to keep up in school. A timely push from a collegian can change their lives and the tutor's as well. Such is the aim of the Northern Student Movement, a loose-knit, Yale-based fraternity of 2,200 collegians at 50 campuses, from M.I.T. to Oberlin to Swarthmore. They give several nights a week to tutoring about 3,500 Negro youngsters in cities all over the Northeast. Results have been undramatically good. In Philadelphia, a survey of 240 kids showed 50% of them doing "a little better" in school and 41% doing "much better." In Hartford, Conn., 13-year-old Pearley-Mae Sampson has hiked her average from C to B under the guidance of Trinity College Senior Henry Whitney, 21. In Harlem, Tutor Carl Anthony took a seventh-grader with third-grade reading ability and in two weeks helped her to get 90 on a seventh-grade spelling test. Step by step, the kids are getting with it. Countryman & Co. The main force behind N.S.M. is its paid ($50 a _week) director. Peter Countryman, an intense Chicagoan of 21 who normally would have been a senior at Yale this year. Countryman got stirred by Southern Negro student sit-ins in 1961, began to see the academic world as "pretty sterile." Cutting classes, Countryman in two weeks collected 6,000 books for a hard-pressed Negro college in Virginia, wound up spearheading a Northern campus fund drive for sitins. He dropped out of Yale to run N.S.M. because "I felt a call to do it." Last summer Countryman & Co. set up classes for the school-less Negro youngsters of Virginia's Prince Edward County, and also tackled North Philadelphia, where the high school dropout rate is 60% and only 2 1/2% of the kids get to college. N.S.M. recruited 175 tutors (including about 70 Negroes) at colleges from Amherst to Sarah Lawrence, put them to work with 375 youngsters for four hours a week all summer. One byproduct: Countryman's marriage to Tutor Joan Cannaday, a Negro Sarah Lawrence graduate and daughter of a Philadelphia high school guidance counselor. Building Confidence. In Hartford this year, N.S.M.'s 100 tutors from Trinity and other colleges have worked with 300 kids in evening sessions at three high schools. Hartford Seminary Student Peter Morrill, 22, who says that "this is the only way to actualize the things in the Bible," set up a shabby N.S.M. office in Hartford's heavily Negro North End. Going beyond tutoring, Morrill and 25 co-workers get people to the polls and campaign against rent gouging. "We're showing these people they have a chance." says Joe Norman, 18, a Negro student at the Hartford Art School. Countryman, who is duly wary of white Lady Bountifulness, is now searching for a Negro to take over his job. He plans to return to Yale next fall, aims to leave fulltime N.S.M. offices running in Boston, Hartford, New York, Baltimore, Philadelphia, Washington and Chicago. His summer agenda is to muster 2,400 collegians to tutor 4,000 high school students. To foot the bill, he has $30,000 from foundations and a Philadelphia drug house. N.S.M. clearly can make only a dent in the great mass of Negro slum kids who consider education strictly square, but it has started something worth doing well.

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