NAACP chairman Julian Bond: Affirmative Action
still necessary “until all races are equal”
The chairman of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, Julian Bond, spoke at UMass Amherst in the fall of 1999 about affirmative action and college admissions. His lecture was the product of a collaboration between the Black Student Union, the Office of Jewish Affairs, and the Office of Human Relations.
Bond has been an advocate for civil rights and economic justice for more than four decades. In 1960, while a student at Morehouse College in Atlanta, Bond founded the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), the interracial group which organized student sit-ins to desegregate restaurants and other public facilities in the South. SNCC also organized a massive voter registration drive that changed the face of southern politics.
Bond was elected to the Georgia House of Representatives five years later, but was prevented from taking office by those opposed to his anti-Vietnam War activities. He was finally allowed to take his seat in the Georgia House only after the U.S. Supreme Court intervened.
In 1968, Bond co-chaired a challenge delegation from Georgia at the Democratic Convention. He was the first black chair of the Fulton County Delegation in the Georgia State Senate, where he sponsored more than sixty bills that were later enacted into law.
In his lecture, entitled “Forging Our Future: The Debate About Affirmative Action and College Admissions,” Bond discussed social injustices and how they relate to education; the availability of and access to education for minorities; and the need for affirmative action.
He said that over nine million African Americans currently live in black ghettos, making it difficult for them to escape from poverty. These people, he said, “face a life of poverty and isolation.”
Addressing the need for affirmative action in the workplace, Bond said that when a black student enters the workforce after graduation, he will not earn as much as a white student doing identical work. “It is the black skin, not the yellow parchment [diploma] that sets the rules,” he said, adding that “without affirmative action, both white and blue collars around black necks would begin to shrink.”
Alluding to the recent backlash against affirmative action, Bond said many people refuse to believe there is still racial inequality in the United States. To illustrate the nature of race relations in the U.S., he posed an analogy between affirmative action and a football game:
The black and white teams have been playing football for some time, yet the white team is always ahead, because the rules favor that team. No matter how well they play, no matter how hard they try, and no matter how qualified they are, “blacks will never catch up” unless the rules are changed. That, he said, is the reason why affirmative action is still needed.
He lamented the current racial climate, in which “we ask for justice and fair play, and they tell us we’re playing the race card.” Affirmative action, he said “has never been about preferential treatment for blacks.” It’s about leveling the playing field, he said. “The time to disband affirmative action will be when all races are truly equal.”
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