Julian Bond Speaking at The NAACP Convention

By Zenitha Prince

Washington Bureau Chief

CINCINNATI (July 13) – With the keynote address of NAACP Board of Directors Chairman Julian Bond on July 13, the organization’s 99th convention officially began.  Re-elected earlier this year as board chairman, a position he has served in since 1998, Bond usually sets the tone for the annual meeting.  In his near 45-minute speech, the chairman demonstrated in his inimitable style why he and the 99-year-old organization remain forces to be reckoned with, observers said.

“I’ve heard people on TV questioning whether the NAACP is still relevant,” said Christopher  Taylor, first vice president of the Oktibbeha County, Mississippi, NAACP branch. “Well, it  is and he just proved it today.”

Right off the bat, Bond neutralized any suggestion of a failing NAACP, despite falling membership and resources.  “I can report tonight that in our 99th year, the NAACP is healthy, alive and we’re well,” he said. “In all these 99 years, we’ve never had enough members or enough money and we do not have enough of either one today.  “But I know that if we keep our collective shoulders to the wheel, we can and will overcome.”

Bond pointed to increased voter registration and turnout in this year’s primaries and more racial tolerance among members of the younger generation as fruits of the organization’s labor.  “These attitudes have everything to do with the successful civil rights movement

and the work the NAACP has waged for almost 100 years,” he said. “That work infuses every election, given the lasting importance of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, but it has been especially evident this year.”

That Sen. Barack Obama, D-Ill., has a good chance of becoming the first African-American president of the United States is strong evidence that the country is moving forward on the issue of race, Bond said, but by no means is it a sign that the nation’s deep-seated racial problems are solved.  “The country seems proud—and I know all of us here are—that a candidate campaigning in

cities where he could not have stayed in a hotel 40 years ago has won his party’s nomination for the nation’s highest office,” he said. “[But] Senator Obama’s candidacy [does not] herald a post-civil rights America, any more than his victory in November will mean that race as an issue has been vanquished in America.”

Professor Bond then took the audience on a train ride through the history of the Black struggle for human rights and equality. From the days of slavery and Jim Crow to today, he charted a course through several of the White House administrations, detailing the negative attitudes and legal barriers that impeded the attainment of civil rights and the role of the NAACP in breaking down those barriers. President Lyndon Johnson was the only one who

didn’t need to be strong-armed into passing civil rights laws, Bond said. And, later, under “the man who liked to be called ‘the first Black president of the United States’”—President Bill Clinton— “we fared much better,” the chairman added. “But then we watched him try to bring down the man who would be the first real Black president.”

A large portion of Bond’s speech, however, as it has been in the last seven annual conventions, was an indictment of President George W. Bush, who Bond said, “made his father, who did little for civil rights, seem like a champion of freedom.”  Bond declared: “In 2004, the Internal Revenue Service threatened to revoke the NAACP’s tax exempt status because I dared to criticize President Bush.”  Referring to an old spiritual used to bolster the spirits of civil rights activists, he continued, “Well, we ain’t  gonna let anybody turn us around, including the IRS, and the NAACP will continue to speak truth to

power until this administration leaves town.”  And that moment cannot come soon enough, Bond said.

With the long-ranging effects of an unwanted war, warrantless wiretapping of U.S. citizens, the use of  “Rovian politics of divide and conquer,” new voter identification laws that activists say suppress Black and Latino votes and more, civil rights enforcement has been jeopardized, he said. Additionally, a widening wealth gap, the housing crisis and spiraling gas prices and other negative socioeconomic indicators have brought the nation on “the brink of disaster.”

By virtue of their race, many Blacks have already toppled over the brink, Bond said.
 
Compared to Whites, Blacks have higher infant mortality rates, have higher chances for imprisonment, die more from homicide, are uninsured, have lost their homes due to discriminatory lending practices, attend failing public schools, live below the poverty line and more.
 
The NAACP’s struggle to address these social ills is part of a “never ending fight between right and wrong.” But while the battle may be long and the problems overwhelming, Bond said, the audience should take comfort in the words of his grandfather, who wrote in 1901: “Wrong for a time may seem to prevail and the good already accomplished seem to be overthrown. But forward in the struggle, inspired by the achievements of the past, sustained by faith that knows no faltering, forward in the struggle.”
 

“We’ve been needing to hear that,” said Taylor, the Oktibbeha County Branch member. “Once I get back to my county I’m going to give a briefing and I am going to paraphrase Dr. Bond and tell people what happened [in the past] and what we need to do now.”
 
Essie Scruggs, of Fort Worth, Texas, said she learned much from Bond’s history lesson.  “I always enjoy hearing him speak because he is so real and he keeps history alive,” she said.
 

Baltimore native Angela Alexander, 23, said she, too, appreciated all the information but also the hope Bond imparted. “It was inspirational and it was also educational going through the history of civil rights movement from the perspective of politics, housing, everything,” she said, then added, “Having grown up in inner city Baltimore I’ve seen the worst of life—gangs, violence, failing schools, poor housing…It’s comforting to know there are people trying to help fix these problems.”  Alexander, who attended the NAACP

convention for the first time this year, said Bond’s speech was an event she could not afford to miss.  People told me to make sure and go to anything where Chairman Bond was speaking,” she said. “It was worth it.”