We Are Dedicated

CIVIL RIGHTS

The Rev. Bruce W. Klunder, 27, was a big, mild, bespectacled man, a sort of Clark Kent of the pulpit. But within him burned a fierce-- and, as it turned out, fatal--sense of indignation.

A white Presbyterian minister, Klunder was born in Oregon, graduated from Yale University Divinity School, went to Cleveland in 1961 as assistant executive secretary of the Student Christian Union at Western Reserve University. He swiftly threw himself into the center of the city's civil rights fight.

A prime target in that fight is the Lakeview school, under construction as part of a crash program that was started in February after a burst of race riots and a series of conciliatory meetings between the Cleveland school board and civil rights leaders. But because Lakeview and two other new elementary school sites are all in predominantly Negro neighborhoods, the civil rights forces insist that they would merely "promote resegregation."

Storm of Stones. One afternoon last week, therefore, about 100 demonstrators broke from the edge of the muddy Lakeview lot, threw themselves at the wheels and treads of bulldozers, power shovels, trucks and mobile concrete mixers. A power shovel operator watched in disbelief as six people--including a woman five months pregnant--leaped into a ditch and stretched out prone just beneath the shovel's jaws. Police moved in to disperse the demonstrators, but many came out of the muck fighting. Twenty-one were arrested that day; two were hurt.

The civil rights leaders were by no means through. Said the Rev. Klunder, who was also vice chairman of the local CORE group: "We are dedicated and committed to continue, and we will not stop short of having the school board revise its plans. This can be done by placing our bodies between the workers and their work."

Next day Klunder and about 1,000 other demonstrators returned to the school. Already awaiting them were dozens of Cleveland cops in a glowering cordon around the site. The inflamed mob threw rocks, bricks, bottles and chunks of cement at the policemen. Charging under a storm of stones, the demonstrators repeatedly tried to break through the lines. Thirteen persons--eight of them cops--were hurt. Twenty-six were arrested.

Sneak Invasion. Klunder gathered a group on a nearby street corner, devised a plan for a-sneak invasion of the construction site through adjacent backyards. Moments later the minister, two women and a man dashed across the rutted school lot toward a dirt-pushing bulldozer. Three of them flung themselves into the path of the steel treads. Klunder lay down behind the machine. The driver, John White, 33, stopped when he saw the three in front. He looked around, but did not see Klunder. Slowly, he began backing his six-ton bulldozer. When he finally stopped, the dead body of Bruce Klunder lay in the tread-marked mud.

Instantly, half a dozen men charged past police, attacked White and knocked out some of his teeth before he was rescued. The mob bombarded the cops again for nearly two hours, until police finally drove most of the demonstrators away. Then, as it drew dark, gangs returned to the neighborhood, smashed car windows, overturned a truck and beat the driver, fought police, shattered nearby shopwindows and looted the stores. City officials cracked down, outlawed all picketing and public demonstrations, and postponed any further construction work at the school until a committee named by the school board and civil rights groups could make yet another study of classroom integration in Cleveland.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.