At Registration each fall. Harvard undergraduates enter an area reserved for undergraduate organizations where they are barraged by the campus's countless extracurricular groups.

Although all students must traverse this proselytizing gauntlet, the experience can be particularly bewildering for the College's approximately 400 Black students. No less than eight active Black organizations vie for these students' time, often offering entirely different ways for Blacks to involve themselves in the community.

While a white student journalist or student politician can choose between a relatively small number of groups, a Black undergraduate finds in addition three essentially political groups, three performance groups, a science club and a literary magazine. Leaders of these organizations say that membership in these groups overlap and that many participants involve themselves in mainstream groups as well. But they describe the selection of extracurricular involvement as a particularly unique experience for Blacks, who have so many alternatives and often feel that their choice of involvement outside the classroom carries political overtones.

Although most of the campus's groups date back to the late 1960s, student leaders describe the Black extracurricular climate in the past few years as having been different from even the late 1970s. The College's integrationist race relations policy coupled with pervasive apathy among all students, has made minority involvement in mainstream political and cultural groups more common, students and officials believe. And a cooling of divisions within the Black community also makes extracurricular involvement more fluid today than it has been in past years, students say.

Now each of the eight groups claims healthy membership and a healthy feeling of independence, despite their perception that the College discourages Black political activism. This spring the biggest Black group, the political Black Students Association (BSA), has shifted to a more moderate style of operation. But perhaps as significant has been the growth in size and visibility by the William J. Seymour Society, an often radical Black Christian group which devotes its energies to community service and downplays the significance of minority involvement on campus. And keeping pace with both of those developments has been the success of cultural groups--the Black C.A.S.T. Drama group; the Kuumba Singers; Expressions, a dance group; and the literary magazine Diaspora--which have begun to assert themselves as independent organizations after initially being under the auspices of BSA through its sister organization, the Afro-American Cultural Center.

The diversity and more moderate stances by Black groups this year represent a departure from the beginnings of Black student groups.

Until the late 1960s, virtually all of Harvard's miniscule Black population was composed of African students. But as the civil rights movement gained national support, Harvard began to admit Black Americans in larger numbers. These students brought with them concerns and attitudes that differed greatly from white and African students at the College.

In 1967, a group of students established the African and Afro-American Student Association--known as "Afro." Initially created to bring together African and American Blacks on campus, the group soon shifted toward the interests of the increasing number of Afro-American students and eventually in 1975 changed its name to the Black Students Association (BSA).

As the Black group gathered momentum, it formed its own cultural groups, including Kuumba. Black C.A.S.T., and Diaspora, a Black literary magazine. Despite their cultural orientation, these groups were initially political. The Kuumba sisters, for example, frequently sang in prisons and at political rallies, says Diane A. Crawford '83, the group's former president. Other groups, although less overtly political, were at least implicitly so in their efforts to define a unique cultural identify or "Black Nationalism." Dean of Students Archie C. Epps III believes these cultural groups were highly influenced by the emergence of radical basis within Black society, their growth moving parallel to the rise in Black consciousness nationwide.

By the late 1970s, however, these groups increasingly as contact with the BSA and, at the same time, largely shed their political undertones. Recent leaders of Kuumba, Diaspora and Black C.A.S.T. agree that their respective organizations have become more exclusively artistic endeavors. "The Black contribution to American art is important enough and of itself to be the sole concern of Black C.A.S.T., former president Patricia S. Bellinger '83 says, adding "politics is not higher than art."

The depoliticization of the Black cultural groups coincides with their increasing independence from the BSA--a shift apparently promoted in part by widespread disenchantment with that organization. Led by a core of out-spoken, often radical, Black students, the BSA gained unprecedented influence in the mid-1970s. Buoyed by ever greater numbers of Afro-American students on campus, the organization called for direct political action by Blacks in America and on campus.

As one Black student recalls, protests against the Ku Klux Klan and nationwide discrimination against Blacks were regularly tied in to anger about racial incidents and insensitivity on campus Students called for recognition of the importance of Black history in the form of an Afro-American Studies Department and, after the department was formed in 1969, continued to seek increased University support for that field of study.

As late as 1980, when a controversial report by an assistant to President Bok suggested that achievement scores of minorities and women overpredict their College academic performance, the BSA was highly visible. More than 200 students protested then, demanding a retraction of the report and the anger helped to forget a University wide Black students coalition.

While that era in some ways marked a highpoint of BSA activities, it also signaled a decline in that organization's preeminence within the Black community as the BSA began to focus on Black issues on campus, earlier community projects--such as tutoring and political support for public schools in the predominantly Black Roxbury area--were neglected by the group. This shift in emphasis drew fire from some Black students, particularly from the Seymour Society, formed in 1980.

In addition to tutoring, food programs and teach-ins concerning the effect of military spending on social services, the Seymour Society this year helped organize a local march against drug usage. Admitting that some perceive the society as "self-righteous," former president Jacqueline O. Cooke '83 defends the group's outward goals and tactics: "We're really struggling to challenge racism at its deepest roots, not simply trying to get Blacks into Harvard." Echoing criticisms of the BSA's lack of concern for national issues and community work, about 15 students in 1981 picketed a BSA-sponsored cabaret held on the anniversary of the death of Malcolm X as part of the organization's annual Malcolm X weekend.