Bond hails civil rights era, decries prejudice, poverty

4:29 p.m., March 15, 2007--The 2008 elections have drawn the most diverse field of leading presidential candidates in U.S. history, which includes a woman, a black and a Hispanic, thanks to the civil rights movement, Julian Bond, chairperson of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), said during a lecture at the University of Delaware on Wednesday, March 14.

In his lecture, “Contemporary Civil Rights: How Do We Gauge Progress?” part of discussions and performances marking Black History Month and Beyond at UD, Bond said racial prejudice and poverty are still prevalent, a reality that was highlighted by the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, which was made worse by the inability of the federal government to swiftly provide assistance.

Bond criticized the administration of President George W. Bush and said that last November's elections, which shifted power in Congress to the Democratic party, “was not an election--it was an intervention.” The devastation and government inaction after Katrina, Bond said, displayed the state of race in “Bush's America.”

“Katrina was televised, and what viewers saw was a deluge of degradation and despair. Tens of thousands of people, mostly black--many elderly and infirm--pleading from rooftops, herded into and around the city's Convention Center and Superdome without food or water, left to rot in the hot sun along the interstate,” Bond said.

Bond: “Katrina was televised, and what viewers saw was a deluge of degradation and despair.”

“We should bear in mind that Katrina did not happen in a vacuum,” Bond said. “The Gulf War was not removed from the Gulf Coast. Katrina served to underscore how the war in Iraq has weakened, rather than strengthened, our defenses, including our levees. The problem isn't that we cannot prosecute a war in the Persian Gulf and protect our citizens on the Gulf Coast at home. The problem is that we cannot do either one.”

Bond said 37 percent of Americans--13 percent of the population--lives in poverty and 5.4 million people joined the category in just the last five years. Quoting President Bush and W.E.B. DuBois, one of the founders of the NAACP, Bond said race and economics are closely intertwined, thus the need to fight racial discrimination and maintain affirmative action.

“Today's apologists argue that discrimination against minorities is not a problem; society has to protect itself from discrimination against the majority instead,” Bond said. “They argue that America is color blind, despite reams of evidence to the contrary, including a recent national survey which reported that the majority of whites believe blacks and Hispanics prefer welfare to work, are lazier, more prone to violence, less intelligent and less patriotic, all confusing poverty's symptoms with poverty's causes.”

Bond gave examples of the work that NAACP has been doing through 2,000 branches around the country and said that the organization is dedicated to an aggressive campaign of social justice, fighting racial discrimination.

Bond said that the opponents of affirmative action who claim that they want fair play in an uneven playing field are actually using doublespeak to freeze the status quo. Affirmative action, he said, is not about preferential treatment for blacks but the removal of the preferential treatment that whites have received for centuries.

“The opponents keep telling us affirmative action carries a stigma which attaches to all blacks--as if none of us ever felt any stigma in the days before the words 'affirmative action' were ever spoken,” Bond said. “Why don't they ever make this argument about the millions of whites who got to Harvard or Yale because dad was president of the company or president of the United States. You never see them walking around, heads held low, moaning that everyone in the executive washroom is whispering about how they got their jobs.”

Bond: “The opponents keep telling us affirmative action carries a stigma which attaches to all blacks--as if none of us ever felt any stigma in the days before the words ‘affirmative action’ were ever spoken.”

Bond said a lot more difficult work remained to be done, and it would be a tactical and moral mistake to leave the fight to black Americans alone. He called for unity among people of all colors, including student organizations, in order to meet the challenges ahead.

“The growth in immigration and the emergence of new and vibrant populations of color hold great promise and great peril,” Bond said. “The promise is that the coalition for justice has grown larger and stronger, as new allies join the fight. The peril comes from real fears that our common foes will find ways to separate us and divide us. It doesn't make sense if blacks and Latinos fight over which group has less power; together we can constitute a mighty force for right.”

Bond, who has been chairperson of NAACP since 1998, has been active in civil rights and economic justice efforts for the past 47 years. He received the National Freedom Award in 2002 and is a professor of history at the American University in Washington, D.C.

The lecture was cosponsored by UD's Cultural Programming Advisory Board and the Center for Black Culture.

Article by Martin Mbugua
Photos by Kevin Quinlan

E-mail this article

Subscribe to UDaily

Subscribe to crime alert e-mail notification