The NAACP's Battles Are Much the Same as 100 Years Ago

Editor's Note: This is a speech by Julian Bond, Chairman of the NAACP Board of Directors and given at their 98th annual convention held this year at Cobo Hall in Detroit.

It was ninety-eight years ago, during the first week of 1909, when three people met to form what would become the NAACP. One was the descendant of abolitionists, the second was Jewish, and the third was a Southerner -- a Southerner whose mother's people were Kentucky slaveholders, as my father's people were Kentucky slaves.

That first meeting produced a Call -- issued on February 12, 1909, the 100th anniversary of Abraham Lincoln's birth. The Call asked the nation then as we ask it today:

How far has it gone in assuring to each and every citizen, irrespective of color, the equality of opportunity and equality before the law, which underlie our American institutions and are guaranteed by the Constitution?

It called upon "all [the] believers in democracy" to gather for a national conference which eventually resulted in the NAACP.

The original incorporation papers of the NAACP listed as its goals:

To promote equality of rights and eradicate caste or racial prejudice among the citizens of the United States; to advance the interest of colored citizens; to secure for them impartial suffrage; and to increase their opportunities for securing justice in the courts, education for their children, and complete equality before the law.

That remains our mission today.

Then, as now, nativists argued for further restrictions on immigration, seeking an ethnically pure America.

Then, segregationists mandated the separation of blacks and whites in all public places; now, neo-segregationists want to end racial remedies in all public institutions and place restrictions on access to the ballot box which fall most heavily on racial minorities and the poor.

Then, as now, racism masquerading as science proclaimed the genetic inferiority of black people, an acceptable antidote for the status anxieties of America's shrinking majority.

And then, as now, racial scapegoating became a substitute for real solutions to complex problems, reminding us that while so much changes, too much remains the same.

Ninety-eight years is a grand old age for a person; it is only a fraction in the lifetime of a nation.

We are such a young nation so recently removed from slavery that only my father's generation stands between Julian Bond and human bondage; I am the grandson of a slave, as are many in this nation.

My grandfather, James Bond, was born in 1863, in Kentucky; freedom didn't come for him until the 13th Amendment was ratified in 1865.

He and his mother were property, like a horse or a chair. As a young girl, she had been given away as a wedding present to a new bride, and when that bride became pregnant, her husband -- that's my great-grandmother's owner and master -- exercised his right to take his wife's slave as his mistress.

That union produced two children, one of them my grandfather.

At age 15, barely able to read and write, he hitched his tuition -- a steer -- to a rope and walked across Kentucky to Berea College and the college took him in.

When my grandfather graduated from Berea, in 1892, the college asked him to deliver the commencement address.

He said then:

The pessimist from his corner looks out on the world of wickedness and sin, and blinded by all that is good or hopeful in the condition and progress of the human race, bewails the present state of affairs and predicts woeful things for the future.

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In every cloud he beholds a destructive storm, in every flash of lightning an omen of evil, and in every shadow that falls across his path a lurking foe.

He forgets that the clouds also bring life and hope, that lightning purifies the atmosphere, that shadow and darkness prepare for sunshine and growth, and that hardships and adversity nerve the race, as the individual, for greater efforts and grander victories.

In the first years of the 21st Century, we have been tested, as an organization and as a nation, by "hardships and adversity." If my grandfather was right, we are now poised for "greater efforts and grander victories."