10 Questions: For Julian Bond On Civil Rights
Nancy Ramsey is a contributor to CBSNews.com
Last month two critical milestones of this country’s civil rights movement had their 50th anniversaries: the integration of Little Rock’s Central High School and President Eisenhower’s signing of the Civil Rights Act of 1957. The month also saw racial divisions and tensions coming to the fore in Jena, La., when the rural town drew demonstrators to its streets to protest the treatment of six black high school students, who were charged with beating a white student after a noose was hung from a tree in the school’s yard. Just yesterday House Democrats condemned the Department of Justice for not intervening.
For some perspective on the civil rights movement—its triumphs, its shortcomings, its current standing—we called Julian Bond. Now chairman of the NAACP and a professor of history at the University of Virginia, Bond has been on the forefront of civil rights all his life. As a college student in Atlanta in the late 1950s and early ’60s, he founded an organization to integrate the city’s theaters, lunch counters and parks. He went on to help found SNCC, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, and later was elected to the Georgia House of Representatives—but it took Supreme Court intervention for him to be seated.
We posed our 10 Questions to him and found that he is still as provocative and challenging as he ever was.
1. You were a very active participant in the civil rights movement. Looking back, what do you think the movement's greatest triumph was? And its failures?
The greatest triumphs were the passage of the '64 Civil Rights Act and the '65 Voting Rights Act. These two laws codified important demands of the then civil rights movement - access to public facilities and access to the franchise.
The movement's greatest failure – and it is immense - is its failure to convince our fellow Americans that racial discrimination remains a severe problem today. A majority of white Americans today by every poll believe black and white Americans have achieved equal status in the country - in fact, many believe equality was achieved by the time Martin Luther King died. And that complaints about inequality are from those who are just ingrates or discontents, who wouldn’t be satisfied with anything.
Despite ample evidence that there’s an enormous racial divide, people more and more think that if you live in a poor neighborhood, a place like the South Bronx, for example, it’s because you want to or because of some character flaw that makes it impossible for you to do any better. There’s nothing external about your situation, it’s all internal...
(AP)
For some perspective on the civil rights movement—its triumphs, its shortcomings, its current standing—we called Julian Bond. Now chairman of the NAACP and a professor of history at the University of Virginia, Bond has been on the forefront of civil rights all his life. As a college student in Atlanta in the late 1950s and early ’60s, he founded an organization to integrate the city’s theaters, lunch counters and parks. He went on to help found SNCC, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, and later was elected to the Georgia House of Representatives—but it took Supreme Court intervention for him to be seated.
We posed our 10 Questions to him and found that he is still as provocative and challenging as he ever was.
1. You were a very active participant in the civil rights movement. Looking back, what do you think the movement's greatest triumph was? And its failures?
The greatest triumphs were the passage of the '64 Civil Rights Act and the '65 Voting Rights Act. These two laws codified important demands of the then civil rights movement - access to public facilities and access to the franchise.
The movement's greatest failure – and it is immense - is its failure to convince our fellow Americans that racial discrimination remains a severe problem today. A majority of white Americans today by every poll believe black and white Americans have achieved equal status in the country - in fact, many believe equality was achieved by the time Martin Luther King died. And that complaints about inequality are from those who are just ingrates or discontents, who wouldn’t be satisfied with anything.
Despite ample evidence that there’s an enormous racial divide, people more and more think that if you live in a poor neighborhood, a place like the South Bronx, for example, it’s because you want to or because of some character flaw that makes it impossible for you to do any better. There’s nothing external about your situation, it’s all internal...
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