Bond describes bringing down evil, making dream

While Julian Bond attended Morehouse College, he was a student in the only class Dr. Martin… While Julian Bond attended Morehouse College, he was a student in the only class Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. ever taught. One day, after class, Bond and King took a walk together, and Bond asked King how the professor was doing.

King said he wasn’t doing well – that unemployment was high and segregation was still rife in the south.

“I have a nightmare,” King said, according to Bond.

The end of the story betrays Bond’s wry sense of humor.

“You’ve got to turn that around, Doc,” said Bond, who told the story Wednesday night as a part of Robert Morris University’s Pittsburgh Speakers Series. “Say ‘I have a dream.'”

Bond, who is chair of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People’s board, did indeed study under King at Morehouse and struggled through the same turbulent times as King in pre-civil rights movement America. As Bond recalls, it was a time of great progress, particularly with the arrival of the U.S. Supreme Court’s Brown vs. Board of Education decision.

“Brown, by destroying segregation, legally gave a nonviolent army the opportunity to destroy [segregation’s] morality as well,” he said.

He told the Heinz Hall audience that the movement he embraced as a leader of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee “saw wrong and acted against it. It saw evil and brought it down.”

But according to Bond, the ’50s and ’60s were hardly “the good, old days.” Segregation and racial discrimination created what he described as “a vast affirmative action system for whites.”

Bond was drawn into another cultural clash of the era by his election to the Georgia House of Representatives in 1965. His vehement opposition to the Vietnam War incited members of the legislature to prevent him from taking his seat. He was elected twice more, but only upon his third election did a ruling from the U.S. Supreme Court allow him to take his seat.

He is no less passionate in his opposition to the current war and the Bush administration.

“Their idea of equal rights is the Confederate and American flags, side by side,” Bond said. “They draw their support from the Taliban wing of American politics.”

He turned his criticism to the USA PATRIOT Act as well, referring to Attorney Gen. John Ashcroft as “J. Edgar Ashcroft,” and remarking that “democracy is too often lost in the pursuit of democracy.”

Reflecting upon racial progress in the United States, Bond insisted that affirmative action is still imperative to bridging achievement gaps between whites and blacks.

Bond believes that opponents of affirmative action really want a “color-free America,” rather than a color-blind America.

“Most of our elite professions have long been the exclusive reserve of white men,” Bond said. He added that racial stigmas are “virtually as alive today as they were in the 19th century.”

He assailed the Bush administration’s positions on affirmative action, particularly the administration’s brief filed in opposition to the University of Michigan’s affirmative action program. Bond called Bush’s opposition “ironic,” noting that Bush is said to be a beneficiary of “legacies” in admission to Yale and Harvard.

Bond called Secretary of State Colin Powell and National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice “human shields on any criticism on civil rights,” but he did applaud their support of affirmative action programs.

When questioned about changing ethnic demographics and the growing population of Hispanics in the United States, Bond welcomed them to the NAACP, saying that “colored people come in all colors.”

Discussing the growing burden upon younger people to support entitlements, he said that the ratio of workers to retirees receiving Social Security would eventually drop from 5:1 to 3:1, and added that the names of those three people could easily be “Tamika, Maria and Jose.”