Via: defendernetwork.com
A year after stepping down as board chair of the NAACP, Julian Bond is as vocal as ever about the ongoing fight for civil rights.Bond brought his views to Houston recently as keynote speaker at Houston Community College’s Black History Scholarship Gala.
During a meeting with local media, Bond said race is still an issue in America, and those who think otherwise are “living in a dream world.”
Bond has been active in the movement for some 50 years. While a student a Morehouse College in the early 1960s, he co-founded the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, better known as SNCC.
He went on to serve as a legislator in the Georgia House and Senate for 20 years. He chaired the NAACP from 1998 to 2010.
Bond is currently a distinguished adjunct professor at American University in Washington, D.C., and a faculty member in the history department of the University of Virginia.
In Houston, Bond shared his thoughts on such topics as police brutality, today’s activists and the status of the NAACP.
‘New’ civil rights issues
“They’re pretty much the same issues that have always been on the table: jobs, education, work, and the kinds of things that African Americans have struggled for and won some victories on over the years. Those really don’t change much. They’re the same now as they are when the NAACP was founded 102 years ago and while the parameters change and the struggle changes somewhat the issues don’t really change at all.”
Perceptions about the NAACP
“Actually, the membership in the NAACP is rising every year. The board meets four times a year. We just met a week ago and at every board meeting we charter new branches. So, the notion that our membership is dropping is just a fiction. It’s not true. Our membership is rising. But, we’ve never had enough members. We’ve never had 10 percent of the people we think ought to be supporting us and we just urge them to join up. We need them badly; we need their support. We need their money, we need their efforts, we need their membership.”
Chad Holley videotaped police beating
“I don’t know anything at all about this particular case, but it sounds like a familiar story. Police, black people, tension, difficulty, violence, brutality. It’s an old story we’ve heard over and over again what you’ve got to do is try as best you can to get to do the bottom of it. Who did what to whom and why? And, if you find something wrong to have occurred then the wrongdoers need to be punished. If their police officers aren’t immune from this they need to be punished just like any other law breaker and need to be punished severely as a lesson to those others so they won’t do it again.”
Methods to mobilize the masses
“Of course all this new social media Facebook and Twitter and the Internet didn’t exist at the hey-day of the Civil Rights Movement in the 1960s and we got along well without it. We found ways to do without it because we didn’t have it. We had to go find ways to do whatever we do. But, the best way of mobilizing anybody is face-to-face contact. To go to your neighbor, to go to your friend, go to the guy who lives down the street, the woman who lives across the street and say listen I need you to become involved. I need you to register to vote, I need you to come to this meeting. That’s the best way to make sure people are involved.”
Notion of a post-racial society
“I don’t understand; what are they talking about? Is race no longer an issue? If they do [think so] they’re fools, they’re living in a dream world. Race is still a major issue in the United States today…we wish it was otherwise, but it isn’t.”
Sensitive and paranoid?
“Yes we are. We are sensitive. If you live in a society that thinks you’re not worth what other people are, if you live in a society where everything you do is questioned and held up to some criticism, of course you become paranoid. Because even paranoids have enemies. So, it’s perfectly normal to say that a great deal of Black America suffers from some level of paranoia, not rabid paranoia, but some level of paranoia. Why not?
Black unification
“I think you said it right when you said ‘seemed’ more unified [in the 1950s and ‘60s]. There’s never a time in my history that all Black people believed the same thing or worked in the same way to do the same thing. There were times when it appeared that the community was more united. But, it was not totally united then and it’s not totally united now. It ought to be…that’s what we work for and hope for, but unfortunately that’s not the truth.”
Today’s activists
“I think there are many, many people of all ages – young and older – who are active in this movement and there are too many for me to call their names. But, if you go to any town or city in the United States you’ll find people who are of older age, younger age, even high school age who are engaged somehow or the other for justice and equal rights. So, it’s not an age bound movement, it’s a movement of people drawn across the age spectrum and they are as active now as they always have been.”
Gay rights, human rights
Well, I think it’s a matter of education and some convincing people that everybody in this country has rights. There’s no such thing as gay rights, just as there is no such thing as Black rights. Everybody has rights. Everybody has the right to be treated decently. Gay people have that right, Black people have that right, white people have that right, women have that right. Everybody has those rights. And, as we become more aware that these are universal rights and that everybody has them, then these problems will seem to fade away.
Morgan Lynch
DEFENDER
