
                         Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: THURSDAY, August 19, 1993                   TAG: 9308190038
SECTION: NATIONAL/INTERNATIONAL                    PAGE: A-10   EDITION: METRO 
SOURCE: Associated Press
DATELINE: WASHINGTON                                LENGTH: Medium

YOUTH FEELING SHUT OUT OF 30TH MARCH ANNIVERSARY

Members of the civil rights old guard say they want to use the upcoming march on Washington to "pass the torch" of leadership. But some young people anxious to accept it won't be close enough to touch it.

The old and the young will mark the 30th anniversary of the watershed 1963 march with two separate events next week. Plans for young people are geared toward those who can be found in college or church.

That has irritated some under 35, who say this march is yet another wallow in movement nostalgia. The most important event, an Aug. 28 march and rally, is dominated by civil rights luminaries, who each plan to hand off a symbolic torch to a young person after they speak.

"They're not really passing the torch to somebody new, coming off the street," said David Cobb, 31, of Washington, who plans to sit out the march. "They'll pass it to people who they've put next in line, someone they can tell what to do and how to do it."

Cobb, a property officer with the District of Columbia Police Department, is the type of young person march organizers want to attract. But Cobb is disenchanted with activism and skipped anniversary marches in 1983 and 1988, mainly because he feels his peer group has been shut out.

Critics say there are no plans for young people outside the middle class and most in need of the march's goals: "Jobs, Justice and Peace."

Carl Upchurch, head of the Council for Urban Peace and Justice, a national truce movement for street gangs, said his group, which is bringing 1,000 marchers from six cities, asked to speak and encountered resistance from "those people who can best be identified as the Birmingham-Selma-Memphis gang."

He was referring to those who joined the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. in those three Southern cities for civil rights protests that riveted the nation's attention in the 1960s.

"In all these organizations, you have young people who really feel they've been dissed very hard," Upchurch said, using a slang term for being treated with disrespect.

"They want you to come in, be the token young person, say a paragraph about what it's like to be a young person and then get out of the way."

Organizers have taken great pains to avoid a generational split, said the Rev. Barry Hargrove, 27, the march's youth events coordinator.

"I've been rather impressed with the seriousness with which my opinions have been taken," Hargrove said. "I think the people who are here and were marching . . . are really ready to just let somebody else continue on."

People under 35, Hargrove said, have been the most interested in the march and are planning to march by the bus load. "This is one of the hardest groups to get at," he said. "I hope this means we are ready to move ahead."

But there are no younger activists among the co-chairmen of the march organizing committee. They include King's widow, Coretta Scott King; Jesse Jackson; Urban League president John Jacob; NAACP Director Benjamin Chavis; and the Rev. Joseph Lowery, president of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference.

The youngest is Chavis, 46.

by CNB