In Black America; NAACP with Julian Bond

From the University of Texas at Austin, KUT Radio, this is In Black America. The Houston NAACP branch is 99 years strong this year and is one historian wrote. If Black historians, if Black Houstonians and Texans were anything, they were organized. And they were quick to act when their rights were restricted or threatened when freedom was under fire. In January of 1921, when the City Democratic Executive Committee here adopted a resolution, excluding Black voters from the upcoming primary, the Black leadership of Houston promptly sued. It would take four United States Supreme Court cases and 23 years, but in the end, they emerged victorious. They'd win because they were what was described as the only organized body, financially equipped and possessing the legal expertise to launch such a sustained attack on the White Primary, the NAACP.

The National Association for the Advancement of Color People recently held its 13th National Convention in Houston, Texas. This year's theme was entitled NAACP Your Power, Your Decision Vote. The week-long convention focused on voter participation in the organization's effort to fight what it sees as restrictive voting laws that have been passed by 17 states. Founded in 1909, the NAACP is the nation's oldest and largest civil rights organization. From a ballot box to the classroom, the thousands of dedicated workers, organizers, leaders, and members of the organization, continues to fight for social justice for all Americans. The convention featured keynote addresses by U.S. Attorney Eric Holder, Republican presidential nominee Mick Romney, vice president Joe Biden, NAACP chairman Jocelyn Brock. And NAACP president and CEO Benjamin Todd Jellis.

I'm John L. Hanson Jr., and welcome to another edition of In Black America. On this week's program, NAACP 103rd National Convention, with board chairman of the Marriages, Julian Bond, and Gary Elbletso in Black America. Then, as now, the nation was at war. Freedom was under fire then, as it is now, at home and abroad. Then, as now, we fought for freedom on two fronts, on foreign battlefields and on American soil. Then, the NAACP took every opportunity to connect the struggle for racial equality at home to the Democratic ideology that powered the Allied forces. Black newspapers used the war emergency to persuade, embarrass, compel, and shame our government and our nation into a more enlightened attitude toward race. Today's times require no less. In fact, they insist on more. The same year Smith V. Allright was decided. In 1944, a black corporal was traveling from an army camp in Arizona to one in Louisiana. He wrote about his experiences.

He said, the only place we could be served at the railroad station, but of course, we had to go into the kitchen. About two dozen German prisoners of war, and two American guards, came to the station. They sat at the tables. They had their meals served in them. They talked. They smoked. In fact, had a swell time. I stood on the outside looking on, and I could not help but ask myself these questions. Are we not American soldiers? Sworn to fight and die of need before our country? Why are they treated better than we? Civilized Icon, Jr. and Bond mixed few words when he spoke to the nearly 1,000 members of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People 103 National Convention in Houston, Texas. Bond called for the nation's oldest and largest civil rights organization to build a coalition with other groups to seek justice for all Americans. From his college days as founder of the Student I and Violent Coordinating Committee to his form and chairman's shit of the NAACP,

Bond has been an active participant in the movement for civil rights, economic justice, and peace and an aggressive spokesman for the disinherited. Born Horus, Jr. Bond on January 14, 1940 in Nashville, Tennessee. He spent most of his childhood in Pennsylvania, where his father and eminent scholar was president of Lincoln University. He left Morehouse College once semester short of graduation in 1961, and threw himself into the movement. As an activist, he faced jail for his convictions, as a veteran of more than two decades of service in the Georgia General Assembly, as a writer, managing editor, teacher, and a broadcaster. Bond has been on the cutting edge of social change since he was a college student leading city and demonstrations in Atlanta in 1960. Well, you know, all through it, I thought to myself, he's not speaking to us. He's speaking to a slice of the American electorate, mostly white people, who wanted to see what his relationship with black Americans is, wanted to see whether he would stand up to black Americans if he felt about something that they didn't feel strongly about, and we saw that in his promise to get rid of Obamacare and the rejection from the audience of that idea, and the relatively tepid response he got.

So this was his saying to the larger audience, I came, I talked to them, I tried to be reasonable, I think they liked some things I said, but they didn't like others, so I'm okay. What do you think the challenges for the NAACP going forward, if they are in challenges? The surrender challenges for us. One is to increase our membership. It's never been as big as it ought to be, but our big challenges to make sure every person who wants to register his registered vote, and every person who's registered to vote turns out on election day. That's an American challenge for all of us. All of us have got to see that as something we need to do. Why is it important for young people to participate with this organization? Well, because if they don't, Heaven knows who might be elected. It might be somebody they'll be cursing about, of course they shouldn't curse, but they'll be worrying about for the next four years, and we just can't have that.

Back in the day when you helped form the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, what was going through your mind and why did you think it was necessary for that organization to be formed? Well, we weren't satisfied what older people were doing, we thought they were too slow and too slow to move, and we knew we were fast and swift, and we'd do it. I think we were not exactly 100% right then, but that's what we believed, and we created this organization, and we did great things. What pressures or tribulations you had to endure trying to be seated in the Georgia legislature? Well, as you know, they put me on the legislature because I opposed the war in Vietnam, and I had to go to the Supreme Court and the Court, luckily validated my right to be there, a vote of nine to nothing, but those were trying times for me because I'd won the election, and I thought in America if you win the election you get to take the seat. Eventually I did, but it took me a trip to the Supreme Court, and three elections before that happened.

Once Chairman of the Board of NAACP, what are some of your biggest accomplishments and some things you didn't get a chance to complete? Well, one of my biggest accomplishments was, I think, getting the board to spend less time talking and more time working, but my successor, Roslyn Brock, has just done a marvelous time of cutting the time of board meetings. They used to seem to me when I was chairman, last forever, and now they last for a reasonable length of time, and everybody can go home happy. Last year we celebrated the anniversary for the freedom writers. Why was that important to celebrate and your participation in that process then and now? Well, if you don't celebrate the past, and don't remind people of what happened there about the fight you fought, and the victories that you won, they'll be forgotten. And people will forget that there was a time when young people and older people fought like this and won, and if they forget that, they won't be able to do it themselves. That's keeping Julian Biden busy these days.

Clean living, don't drink, don't smoke, don't chew, don't go out with girls or do. Alright, thank you. When I spoke to this convention last, we had a president who owed his election more to dynasty than to the voters decision. Today, we have a president who owes his election to democracy, and will owe his re-election to the hard work you and I and thousands of others do in resisting voters, and making sure they turn out and vote. Part of that work is the reason why we gather here. To give thanks to the women and men who helped to keep the arsenal of civil rights loaded and ready to fire. They are the men and women who labor in the vineyard of civil rights, who make sure that the grassroots of the NAACP are tilled and watered, so the fruits of democracy can flourish and grow. Not just presidents, but Texas has given birth to legal presidents, which also make up our legacy, like Smith V. All Right and Sweat V. Painter. And to those who seek to destroy that legacy, such as Hopwood versus Texas.

And Texas and Houston both have a rich NAACP history. The Houston NAACP branch is 99 years strong this year, and is one historian wrote. If Black historians, if Black Houstonians and Texans were anything, they were organized. And they were quick to act when their rights were restricted or threatened when freedom was under fire. In January of 1921, when the City Democratic Executive Committee here adopted a resolution, excluding Black voters from the upcoming primary, the Black leadership of Houston promptly sued. It would take four United States Supreme Court cases and 23 years, but in the end, they emerged victorious. They'd win because they were what was described as the only organized body financially equipped and possessing the legal expertise to launch such an sustained attack on the White Primary, the NAACP. From Charles Love to H.L. Davis, who were plaintiffs in that first lawsuit, to Julius White and Dr. William Drake, who filed suit in 1938, the hall of heroes in the fight against the White Primary is large and luminous.

J. Austin Atkins and Carter Wesley, NAACP field worker Daisy Lamkin, who helped reorganize the Houston branch in the late 1930s. Albert Lucas, elected branch president in 1939, Lulu White, the first full-time salary executive secretary of the Houston branch, R.R. Grovy and Sidney Hasket, and Lonnie Smith, a Houston dentist and branch vice president, who'd become the name plaintiff in Smith V. Allright, the 1944 Supreme Court case that finally finished the White Primary in Texas and throughout the land. All of these, yes, they deserve it and applaud. All of these heroes were propelled by the belief, which we share today, that a voteless people is a hopeless people. They suffered many setbacks and disappointments, as has we, but we persevered. What better place than here? What better time than now to honor them by vowing to turn out in massive numbers in November and to cast our votes?

By ensuring the branches we represent, scattered across the country, see their membership roles grow and grow and grow and grow. Just as a voteless people are a hopeless people, a people who do not support the institutions and organizations that support and protect them, will see those organizations wither and fell. Our pioneers remind us that freedom is not free. It takes strategy and organization in hard work. In 1940, the year I was born, black Texans had already been fighting to end the White Primary for almost 20 years. That was the year Arthur Spengarn became president of the NAACP and William Hastie accepted the chairmanship of the National Legal Committee. That was the year the Houston NAACP issued a call to blacks across Texas and to the National NAACP officials to attend the annual conference of branches in Corpus Christi. There, they met with Thurgood Marshall and drew up a 10-year plan. Their goal was to eliminate white supremacy from Texas Democratic primaries.

The Houston informer, whose staff had voted unanimously to take out an institutional membership in the NAACP, reported the conference decided to ask all black Texans to contribute to the legal fund. They raised the money, they filed a suit, and then because of an intervening Supreme Court decision, they had to drop their case and start all over. Julius White was said to have warned Thurgood Marshall that if he didn't win the next case, he'd better never come back to Texas. He won the next case and Thurgood Marshall in the NAACP have come back to Texas time and time again, and if needed, we'll come back again. But we are here now under circumstances eerily similar to those facing black Americans during the Smith V. All-Write years, 1940 through 1945. Then, as now, the nation was at war. Freedom was under fire then as it is now, at home and abroad.

Then, as now, we fought for freedom on two fronts, on foreign battlefields and on American soil. Then, the NAACP took every opportunity to connect the struggle for racial equality at home to the Democratic ideology that powered the Allied forces. Black newspapers used the war emergency to persuade, embarrass, compel, and shame our government and our nation into a more enlightened attitude toward race. Today's times require no less. In fact, they insist on more. The same year, Smith V. All-Write was decided, in 1944, a black corporal was traveling from an army camp in Arizona to one in Louisiana. He wrote about his experiences. He said, the only place we could be served at the railroad station, but of course, we had to go into kitchen. About two dozen German prisoners of war, and two American guards, came to the station. They sat at the tables. They had their meals served in them. They talked. They smoked. In fact, had a swell time. I stood on the outside looking on, and I could not help but ask myself these questions.

Are we not American soldiers sworn to fight and die of need before our country? Why are they treated better than we? Why does the government allow such things to go on? The black Americans who fought World War II returned home determined to make democracy safe for America, to fight as fiercely for freedom here as they had done abroad. They had fought for a country that would not fight for them. When they came home, democracy was standing on its head, and they helped to turn it right side up. And as they did, they proved once again that black people are profoundly American, deeply committed to the values upon which America was founded, even as those values seemed to remain a distant dream. In 1968, the Kerner Commission concluded that white racism was the single most important cause of continued racial inequality in income, housing, employment, education, and life chances between blacks and whites. But by the middle 1970s, the growing number of blacks pressing into traditionally white institutions created a backlash into this course about race.

Opinion leaders, both inside and outside government, began to reformulate the terms of the discussion. No longer was the Kerner Commission's finding acceptable. Instead, black behavior came the reason why blacks and whites lived in separate worlds. Racism retreated, pathology advanced, and the burden of racial problem solving shifted from racism perpetrators to its victims. The failure of the lesser breeds to enjoy society's fruits became therefore all to loan. Thus pressure for additional stronger civil rights laws became special pleading. America's most privileged population, white men, suddenly became a victim class. Aggressive and insatiable blacks were responsible for America's demise. The cause of racial inequality migrated from bigotry and discrimination to individual and group misbehavior, equating race with deficiency. We saw this over and over again in reaction to Katrina. Another front against racial justice was also open to the mid-70s and has gained strength and power ever since.

Often led by scholars and academicians and funded by corporate America, this effort, part of the anti-government movement, aimed at removing government regulation from every aspect of our life, and found a handy-hated target in civil rights. It is a serious mistake, both tactical and moral, to think this is a fight that must be or should be waged by black Americans again, alone. That has never been so in centuries past, it ought not be so in the century unfolding just now. Black, yellow, red, white, all are needed in this fight. All of us implicated in the continuation of inequality, it will require our common effort to bring it to an end. Present day inequality and racial disparities are cumulative. There are the results of racial advantages compounded over time. They produce racialized patterns of accumulation and disaccumulation. As a result, racial inequality is embedded into the fabric of post-Civil Rights America and American society. Today's apologists argue that discrimination against minorities is not a problem. Instead, society has to protect itself from discrimination against the majority instead.

They like to argue that America's color blind, despite a recent national survey, which reported that the majority of whites think blacks and Hispanics prefer welfare to work are lazier, more prone to violence, less intelligent, and less patriotic. It might have been proper yesterday, they say, to aim big guns and racism at segregated jobs, schools, and ballot boxes. The ills we face today, they say, are crime, teenage pregnancy, welfare dependency, and family disintegration. These call, they claim, for new approaches and for abandoning government's help. To this, we and the NAACP would point to our own past and present record and our methodology of removing racial barriers to equal jobs, housing, and education as a necessary precondition for solving racism's legacy, poverty, crime, and poor education. And we'd argue that both our national programs and our local units are engaged daily in activities aimed at helping black America to help itself, but we'd insist that government must do its part in removing obstacles that government help create. The history of the racial struggle in America is a hymn to self-help, and an acknowledgment that while white Americans will not and cannot voluntarily indiscrimination.

A progressive agenda for the new century must include continuing to litigate, to organize, to mobilize, forming coalitions of the caring and concern, joining ranks against the comfortable, the callus, and the smug. Fighting discrimination wherever it raises its ugly head. And the halls of government, in corporate suites, or in the streets. Demanding fair treatment for people with HIV and AIDS, demanding that criminal justice cease being an oxymoron, we know that race more than any other factor determines who has arrested, who has tried for what crime, who receives what length of sins, and who receives the ultimate punishment, we are determined that this come to a stop. We need to ensure that our children, in inner city and suburban and rural schools, receive the best education they possibly can, and education that prepares them for the century just begun. In acting comprehensive immigration reform, combating hate farms and prohibiting discrimination based on sexual orientation, ending racial profiling, protecting voting rights and returning, reforming our election system, enforcing fair housing laws, ending predatory lending, ensuring equality for all, protecting social security, and promoting peace.

There's much, much more we must do. Much more we must do. Not a bit as easy work, but we've never wished our way to freedom. Instead, we have always worked our way. By the year 2050, blacks and Hispanics together will be 40% of the nation's population. Wherever there are others who share our condition and our concerns, we have to make common cause with them. In the NAACP, we believe colored people come in all colors. Anybody who shares our values is more than welcome. The growth in immigration, the emergence of new and vibrant populations of people of color, hold out great promise and great peril. The promise is that the coalition for justice will grow larger and stronger as new allies join the fight. The peril comes from real fears that our common foes will find ways to separate and divide us. It doesn't make sense that blacks and Latinos argue over which of us has the least amount of power. Together, we can constitute a mighty force for right.

As we carry on this year's convention, let's remember another time when freedom was under fire. In 1844, James Russell Lyle wrote the present crisis in opposition to the proposed annexation of Texas to the United States as a slave state. Our magazine takes its name from this point. That poem, more than 150 years old, speaks to us now. It says, once to every man in nation comes the moment to decide in the strife of truth and falsehood for the good or evil side. Some great cause, God's new Messiah, offering each the bloom or blight and the choice goes by forever, twigs that darkness and that night, though the cause of evil prosper, yet his truth alone is strong, through her portion be the scaffold and to pun the throne be wrong, yet that scaffold sways the future. And behind the demon known, stands God within the shadow, keeping watch above his own. Thank you.

The Texas chapter of the NACP has had a long and stored history. In the 1930s, it was Nixon, V. Herndon, the U.S. Supreme Court struck down a Texas law that paved African Americans from voting in the Texas Democratic primary. Again, in the 1940s, it was Smith V. Allright. This too focused on voting rights. In the 1950s, it was Sweatby Painter. This case involved a separate but equal doctrine of racial segregation. The fight for civil rights in Texas has been a lifelong crusade for Gary L. Bledzo. He has seen firsthand the blight of racism in the state. And his presence of the Texas state conference of the NACP since 1991. He has handled landmark cases involving racial violence and injustice. Well, here's an example of the sadly, it's the place where many historical things occurred in litigation for the NAACP.

You know, we've had everything from Smith V. Allright or Nixon's V. Herndon cases that locked African Americans out from voting in the Democratic primary to we've had the case involving a Houstonian human sweat actually lived in Houston when he decided to challenge the University of Texas to seek to gain admission to the University of Texas. We know the affirmative action cases always come out of Harris County. There is a real anti-affirmative action sentiment that many in this community have. And that actually led to the following of the Fisher case that is up before the Supreme Court now. So many things in our state are defining in the area of civil rights. I know Dean John Britain said that Texas keeps on giving in the area of civil rights and it really does. You know, we had such a regressive plan for redistricting the Congress, the Senate and the House of Representatives that actually came through the legislature this time. We had a very hostile or anti-minority photo identification bill that came through. I know things are all in litigation. So it's important that they be in Houston. It's important that they be in Texas because Texas seems to be leading the nation with this anti-affirmative action, anti-minority sentiment that ends up in litigation and going to the Supreme Court.

I don't know if that's by a habit stance or by design. I kind of feel that it's just happens irregularly. I don't know that it could be by habit stance. You've been president of the Texas State Conference for a while now. What has been the highlights of your tenure thus far? Well, I don't know. There have been some things that we've accomplished that I think that are significant. We were able to attain the creation of the New Congressional seat that Congressman Alexander Green has done a fantastic job. Now holds and I think that was a tremendous accomplishment. I think that we were able to bring about African-American Texas Rangers. That was a major accomplishment. We were able to assist with major initiatives like the desegregation of the housing project inviteer. We were able to work with individuals to get a number of really important laws passed such as the Russian profiling law sponsored by Senator West in Dallas.

We were one of the architects or the James Burr junior hate crimes bill that was carried by Senator Ellis or the bill that requires some standards for representation for person appointed to represent indigence. It was a major accomplishment being able to withhold all the assaults and to still have a top 10 percent law has been a major victory. So there have been a number of major victories. There have been a number of losses as well. It's not a good climate that we live in. If people demagogue the truth and two people have no desire to see right now and they just simply want to advantage their own position and so we have a dishonest dialogue that's taking place. And the sad thing is because of the dynamic that brings place in our nation, it actually sticks. It has impact when you wouldn't think that it would. So you don't really need to have some basis for making an accusation against a minority that generates a lot of support.

No blood cell president, Texas State Conference of the NAACP. If you have questions, comments or suggestions at the future in Black America programs. Email us at jhansen, H-A-N-S-O-N at kut.org. Also let us know what the radio station you heard is over. The views and opinions expressed on this program are not necessarily those of this station or of the University of Texas at Austin. There are previous programs online at kut.org. Until we have the opportunity again for technical producer day, but Alvarez, I'm John L. Hansen Jr. Thank you for joining us today. Please join us again next week. CD copies of this program are available and may be purchased by writing in Black America CDs, KUT Radio, One University Station, Austin, Texas, 78712. This has been a production of KUT Radio.