It was only a probing action, but it shook the very foundations of the fortress. Since 1907, the Oak Room of Manhattan's venerable Plaza Hotel has been an all-male bastion for three hours every weekday at lunchtime. Until last week, that is, when 15 members of the National Organization for Women, led by that superfeminist Betty Friedan (The Feminine Mystique), 47, demanded entrance on the ground that their civil rights were being violated. Five of the ladies actually managed to brush by a Plaza assistant manager and the maitre d' to capture a center table. But then they came up against the main line of resistance; the waiters studiously ignored their repeated cries for service, and the ladies were eventually forced to fall back. "This is the only kind of discrimination that's considered moral—or, if you will, a joke," fumed Mrs. Friedan. But she has not given up. She and the NOW girls have begun planning similar raids in Washington, D.C., and Los Angeles.
"Violence is the worst thing we can think of," Muhammad All, otherwise known as Cassius Marcellus Clay, cautioned delegates to a National Conference of Black Students in Minneapolis. "It's like a bull running into a locomotive: you can admire the bull for his courage, but he'll still end up splattered all over the track." Strange words indeed from a man who used to make his living with his fists—but Ali, undefeated but defrocked heavyweight champion, was not pulling any punches on the race question. On the contrary. "By nature, blacks and whites are enemies," he insisted, urging separatism within America. "We want land. We want factories. We want stores. We must control our own destiny."
It started out as a droning House of Commons debate on the automatic right of hereditary peers to vote in Britain's . House of Lords. But the argument quickly picked up steam when the talk turned to bastardy among the bluebloods. There are 25 dukes, and, said Labor M.P. William Hamilton, more than a few of them trace their lineage back to "those royal romances which always seemed to involve births on the wrong side of the blanket." As Hamilton figures it, the Duke of St. Albans, the Duke of Grafton, the Duke of Richmond and the Duke of Buccleuch are descended from Charles II's twelve bastard children. There was some grumbling that Hamilton was being unfair to illegitimate children of the past. Responded the M.P.: "I am objecting to illegitimate children having the right, by virtue of being illegitimate, of going into the Lords."