Alumni Against 3027 Regent Street Berkeley, California 94705 (415) 845-3835

December, 1985

Dear Fellow Harvard-Radcliffe Graduate:

Alumni Against Apartheid is running three candidates for the Harvard Board of Overseers in April, 1986. They are Kenneth Simmons '54, John Plotz '69, and Gay Seidman '78. All are pledged to a policy of complete divestment.

These candidates are endorsed by the Harvard-Radcliffe Alumni/ae for Divestiture, which has given us your name as a possible supporter.

We have just completed the first phase of our campaign, which was gathering the 232 signatures we needed to get on the ballot. We had a large response and far exceeded the required number.

Now we are entering the more important and difficult part of the struggle: reaching out to the tens thousands of alumni/ae we need actually to win the April election. The University will be sending out mail ballots on April 1 ,1986, to holders of any Harvard degree. Typically, only 20% of the eligible voters bother to send in their ballot. We have to persuade a large number of the regular voters that Harvard's massive -related investments are a bad business. And we have to tum out a large number of people who normally do not vote.

To carry the campaign to the 190,000 alumni of the University, we need two things from you: money and time.

Money: We are aiming to raise $20,000 in the next few weeks to buy space in Harvard Magazine and to do a selected mass mailing. If every one of our supporters contributes $20, we will reach that goal. Since some of us cannot afford that, we ask more from others. Without publicity we will fail, and the election will go down as an endorsement of Harvard's present policy. Please contribute. (And if you can help by raising money from others, please do it!)

Time: We want to do a kind of grass-roots, chain-letter campaign in addition to the more traditional, impersonal methods. We see every one of our supporters as a base. We ask you to copy the enclosed flyer and to send it to everyone you can think of who might vote for us--friends, class­ mates, colleagues, relatives--anyone with a Harvard degree. Make your own mailing list (going through your latest class directory, if possible) and send our flyer along, together with a personal note, asking that person to send it on to yet others.

It is easy to over-e,stimate Harvard's importance in the scheme of things--a common fault of the institution and its graduates. But this election really will mean something. Harvard has $580,000,000 invested in corporations doing business in South Africa. Both the sheer bulk of those investments and the international prestige of the University would make Harvard's divestment an important victory. For that reason, this campaign has been endorsed by Randall Robinson and the Free South Africa Movement. In a sense, the April Overseers election will be the largest referendum ever held on the issue. Together we can win the election and make a real impact, not only at Harvard, but in South Africa as well. Please take the time to help us. And please send us some money. At this point in the campaign. the number of votes we get will be directly proportional to the money we raise. Please. Victory is in sight--but we cannot do it without your help.

Yours in SOlidarity.

Todd Gitlin '63

lAbor Donated FOR BOARD OF OVERSEERS APRIL, 1986 *** KENNETH SIMMONS '54 Long active in the civil rights movement. Graduate work at Harvard, Howard, and Berkeley. Now an urban planner and Associate Professor ofArchitecture at Berkeley.

JOHN PLOTZ '69 Fulbright Scholar. Law degree from Berkeley in 1975. Labor lawyer and law teacher at Berkeley, Peking and Canton. Now Deputy Public Defender in San Francisco.

GAY SEIDMAN '78 First woman president of the CRIMSON. Graduated summa cum laude. Taught school in Botswana and Swazi­ land. Now a doctoral candidate in at Berkeley. ***

Our University has invested $580,000,000 in corporations doing business in South Africa. The time has come for Harvard to stop profiting from these abhorrent investments. The time has come for the graduates of Harvard University to elect responsible Overseers. We ask all Harvard-Radcliffe graduates to vote only for candidates pledged to complete divestment. These candidates will appear on the ballot through the petitions of hundreds of alumni like you. This year, vote!

Alumni Against Apartheid 3027 Regent Street Berkeley, California 94705

Lalx>r Donated