Law Students Will Help Negroes Running in Local Miss. Elections

Six Harvard law students leave today for a week in Mississippi to help local Negro politicians in their campaigns.

Harvard is one of a number of colleges throughout the country who are sending down law students. The program has been organized and financed by the Law Students Civil Rights Research Council which has chapters at these colleges.

After a one-day indoctrination session, the 62 student will disperse and work in a number of counties where Negro candidates stand a good chance of winning, a spokesman for LSCRRC explained. The largest contingent will go to Holmes Country, said to be a stronghold of the Mississippi Free Democratic Party (MFDP), the party which challenged the allwhite delegation to the 1964 Democratic Convention.

The students will work under the direction of the candidates, helping them to organize the final drive for votes and, on election day, supervise the elections and recording any irregularities such as ballot box stuffing.

The program initially called for 85 students but the budget was trimmed when LSCRRC could raise only $10,000 of the $18,000 that would have been needed.

Howard University is sending the largest group. "We wanted to send as many Negroes as we could rather than white students--even though the whites may already have had some experience in the South," explained a spokesman for LSCRRC. At Harvard, more than 30 students applied.

Project director Ronald Pollock, a New York University law student, admitted that "the project won't have any great impact on Mississippi, but it will on the people who go down there." Most are first-year law students, who, said Pollock, would be likely to commit more time to such work in the future.