CITIES: The Amazing Mr. Lee

Well satisfied with his face lifting of New Haven, Conn. (pop. 149,000), fourth-term Mayor Richard C. Lee, energetic slum clearer and chairman of the Demo cratic Advisory Council’s subcommittee on urban problems, is eager to advise the nation’s metropolises on their slum problems. Speaking to a predominantly Negro Sunday school group, Dick Lee, 44, last week suggested a strategic variation on Southern lunch-counter sit-ins that sent official eyebrows soaring in police headquarters across the land.

“Why not a sit-out to follow the sit-ins?” asked Lee. “Just imagine if all the people who live in the slums of our great cities were to leave their tenements, take chairs into the middle of the streets and sit out under the stars on some fine sum mer evening at 5:30? Perhaps then, when traffic ground to a halt and commuters were late for supper, we could convince some of the bankers and landlords and businessmen who make their livings in the cities but live in the suburbs to take a walk through the slums and see the conditions which prevail.”

Sit-outs, said he, would be “a decent, logical, common-sense element of our own legal foundations, of our Constitution.” Police in New York and Detroit, slum-ridden cities singled out by Lee, were aghast. Sit-outs, said Detroit’s Police Commissioner Herbert W. Hart, would be treated “as flagrant violations of the law, and everyone participating would be arrested for obstructing traffic.”