2008 NAACP Convention
Cincinnati, Ohio
Copyright 2008 by Julian Bond
July 13, 2008
To Vice-Chair Roslyn Brock, other members of the Board of Directors, Trustees of the NAACP’s Special Contribution Fund, NAACP staff and members, friends, welcome to Cincinnati.
When the Cincinnati Branch of the NAACP was established in 1915, its members were few – 15 to 20 - but brave. Their membership in what was considered a radical organization could have cost them their jobs if discovered. They had no office and held their meetings in members’ homes
Today those 15 to 20 have grown one-hundred fold - to more than 2,000 – under the dynamic leadership of President Christopher Smitherman. Speaking of dynamic leadership, we also salute Sybil McNabb, President of the Ohio State Conference and an SCF Trustee, Ophelia Averitt, member of the National Board from Ohio, and Ohio SFC Trustees Jeanette Altenau and Michael Lisman.
We are meeting on the eve of our 100th Birthday. Next year we will ask the nation to join with us as we celebrate one hundred years of fighting for civil rights and social justice.
Like the Cincinnati Branch, we’ve come from a few brave souls to thousands of committed activists. We extend from California to the New York island and points in between and on foreign shores. We’ve come from an idea to a reality, and while we’ve done much, we all know we have much more to do.
But I can report tonight that in our 99th year, our NAACP is healthy, alive and well!
We continue to manage our resources prudently, mindful that we cannot spend more money than we take in.
Our dedicated staff, still making do with less, is continuing their great work and our grassroots members are still widely recognized as the premier front-line civil rights troops in their communities.
A recent survey confirms that our work is both valuable and valued. The NAACP has the highest favorability of 17 organizations working in the civil rights arena. The NAACP is viewed favorably by almost all blacks – 94%, including 70 percent who view it very favorably, and by three-quarters of the general public. Fully 93 percent of blacks surveyed believe the NAACP represents the interests of the American-American community, and 67 percent believe this strongly.
In all these 99 years, we’ve never had enough members or enough money and we do not have enough of either today.
But I know that if we keep our collective shoulders on the wheel, we can and will overcome.
When we met a year ago in convention, we were divided over apportioning our meager resources between the national office and our various local units.
I want you to know that your Chairman and your Board of Directors have heard your concerns and we will do all we can to insure that our Branches – and especially our State Conferences – have adequate resources to build and increase their capacity to carry on the fight for civil rights.
I intend to ask the Board of Directors when it meets on Thursday to examine ways this can be done, without decreasing the ability of your national office and national staff to give you the services you so badly need. I am sure they will say yes.
Cincinnati is home to the National Underground Railroad Freedom Center, the first major museum dedicated to the Underground Railroad, the network of free blacks, ex-slaves and abolitionists who led slaves to freedom.
We meet during the bicentennial of the abolition of the trans-Atlantic slave trade, which took effect on January 1, 1808. Congress took pains, however, not to disturb “the full, complete and absolute” ownership rights over slaves not so imported.
So slavery would flourish for nearly six decades more, and Cincinnati, by virtue of its location on the Ohio River dividing slave state from free, would become the “Grand Central Station” of the Underground Railroad.
It was here that Margaret Garner, an escaped Kentucky slave, killed her 3-year-old daughter rather than allowing her to be captured and returned to slavery, becoming the inspiration for Tony Morrison’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, Beloved.
But many others fared better. As many as 40 to 50,000 slaves reached freedom though Ohio.
The Underground Railroad became “the nation’s first great movement of mass civil disobedience after the American revolution. … It was also the nation’s first interracial political movement, which from its beginnings … joined free blacks, abolitionist whites and sometimes slaves in a collaboration that shattered racial taboos”.
American slavery was a human horror of staggering dimensions, a crime against humanity. The profits it produced endowed great fortunes and enriched generations, and its dreadful legacy embraces us all today.
Two hundred and forty-six years of slavery were followed by 100 years of state-sanctioned white supremacy, reinforced by public and private terror, ending only after a protracted struggle in 1965.
Thus it has only been a short 40 years or so that all black Americans have exercised the full rights of citizens, only 40 years or so since legal segregation was ended nationwide, only 40 years or so since the right to register and vote was universally guaranteed, only 40 years or so since the protections of the law and Constitution were officially extended to all.
As the author Taylor Branch has written, “[T]hough excluded themselves and largely invisible, [blacks] took the fragile promise of democracy in their hands.”
So let no one dare question whether black people love their country. Black people have always loved their country – they just wanted their country to love them.
The country seems proud, and rightly so, that a candidate campaigning in cities where he could not have stayed in a hotel 40 years ago has won his party’s nomination for the nation’s highest office. But on the heels of Barack Obama’s clinching the nomination came the crude dissing of Michelle Obama as his “baby momma” and the suggestion by Ralph Nader that Obama “wants to talk white.”
Such is the complex rhythm of our nation’s racial dance.
We know that Obama’s electoral success – even if he should win the ultimate prize – will not signal an end to racial discrimination, but it marks the high point of that interracial movement that dates back to the Underground Railroad.
There is a famous American folk song about the Underground Railroad called “Follow the Drinking Gourd.” It memorializes escape instructions that enabled fleeing slaves to make their way north from Alabama to the Ohio River and freedom. The “drinking gourd” – the hollowed out gourd used as a water dipper – here refers to the Big Dipper, the star formation which points to the Pole Star and north. One version goes:
Think I heard the angels say
Follow the drinking gourd.
Stars in the heaven gonna show you the way,
Follow the drinking gourd.
Follow the drinking gourd, we gonna
Follow the drinking gourd.
Keep on traveling that muddy road to freedom,
Follow the drinking gourd.
We have followed the drinking gourd to freedom – and to power and justice. But we know we will have no power, we will have no justice, and we will have no freedom unless we VOTE!
In 2004, the Internal Revenue Service threatened to revoke the NAACP’s tax exempt status because I dared to criticize President Bush. During the civil rights movement, we sang songs to bolster our resolve. One of them said, “Ain’t gonna let nobody turn me around.” Well, we ain't gonna let nobody turn us around, including the IRS, and the NAACP will continue to speak truth to power until this administration leaves town.
What the NAACP did not do in 2004 and will not do now is endorse a candidate. We always have been and we always will be scrupulously non-partisan. But that doesn’t mean we necessarily reject partisanship. It has its place, especially when our two major political parties exist on two separate planets, and one is dominated by neo-cons, theo-cons, and nativists.
Both sides favor compromise, as long as the other side gives in. Our political system is adversarial by design.
President Bush said he wanted to be a uniter. It took him seven years, but boy, has he succeeded. He has united Americans around a desire for change. He has united Americans in our anxiety – about our economic well-being and our dreams deferred; about an unpopular war of choice; and about America’s reduced standing in the world.
As Martin Luther King said of another unpopular war:
“In addition to the isolation of the people from the government, there is our national isolation in the world.”
Of course, the President never wanted to be a uniter. He thrived on Rovian politics of divide and conquer and lived in a fairy-tale world of ‘Mission Accomplished’. For the first six years of the Bush Administration, Republicans had the numbers and Democrats wouldn’t take their own side in a fight.
When Democrats gained control of both houses of Congress after the 2006 midterm elections, it was a portent of the desire for change now sweeping the nation.
Just as our ancestors followed the Big Dipper to freedom, there are many signs that the stars may be aligned this year. Many have become involved, shed their cynicism, and not been afraid to take yes as an answer.
An energized people must say yes to justice, yes to equality, and yes to peace.
We need to redeem the promise of our government. We need to reclaim our democracy for all, not for oil, to put mutual obligations over mutual funds and the public interest over private wealth.
Both our nation and our Association stand on the brink of new leadership. It remains to be seen whether the nation will opt for the visionary and the vibrant, but the NAACP already has.
The great labor leader A. Philip Randolph taught us:
“At the banquet table of nature, there are no reserved
seats. You get what you can take and you keep what you can hold.
If you can’t take anything, you won’t get anything, and if you
can’t hold anything, you won’t keep anything. And you can’t
take anything without organization.”
The man we have chosen as our new CEO knows all about organization – he organized his first voter registration drive when he was 14 years old and has devoted all of his professional life to the issues and causes that are the mission of the NAACP. Now 35, he is the youngest person ever chosen to lead us.
Our new CEO-designate has made some wise choices himself – most importantly, his wife. She was my student at Harvard University. She is a lawyer, formerly with the NAACP Legal Defense Fund – and a law professor. She shares her husband’s life and his life’s work.
Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome Ben Jealous and Lia Epperson.
There is a story told about one of the NAACP’s founders, the journalist and reformer Ida B. Wells. When she was told to move to a blacks-only train car, she not only refused – she bit the conductor as he threw her off the train. Then she sued, winning $500 in damages.
We are still biting the conductor – and Ben Jealous has sharp teeth!
It was on this very date - in 1960 - that John F. Kennedy was nominated for the presidency of the United States. And it will be sixty years ago tomorrow that Hubert Humphrey delivered his famous speech at the 1948 Democratic Convention.
That year, the convention platform committee had approved a weak civil rights plank. Humphrey, risking his political career, decided to go against his party and take the fight for a stronger civil rights plank to the convention floor. He told the delegates:
“[T]o those who say that we are rushing this issue of civil rights, I say … we are 172 years late. To those who say that this civil rights program is an infringement on states’ rights, I say this: the time has arrived in America … to get out of the shadow of states’ rights and to walk forthrightly into the bright sunshine of human rights. ”
Bill Moyers explained what happened next:
“When he finished a mighty roar went up from the crowd. Delegates stood and whooped and shouted and whistled; a forty-piece band played in the aisles, … . The platform committee was then overruled and Humphrey’s plank voted in by a wide margin.”
One can only imagine how those delegates would feel if they could join the delegates to this year’s Democratic convention, when, on August 28 – exactly 45 years to the day after Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech at the March on Washington – Barack Obama gives his acceptance speech as his party’s nominee for President of the United States.
As historian Howard Zinn has written:
“Not to believe in the possibility of dramatic change is to forget that things have changed, not enough, of course, but enough to show what is possible. We have been surprised before in history. We can be surprised again. Indeed, we can do the surprising. …”
One change we know is coming. The current administration is going. And not a moment too soon. As Thomas Friedman put it recently, “We are a country in debt and in decline… .”
Dr. King’s words speak to us now:
“Perhaps a new spirit is rising among us. If it is, let us trace its movements and pray that our own inner being may be sensitive to its guidance, for we are deeply in need of a new way beyond the darkness that seems so close around us.”
This Administration, too often with the complicity and cowardice of the opposing party and the media, has brought us to the brink of disaster. We face increasing income inequality, a nationwide housing crisis, and skyrocketing gas prices.
They made up in chutzpah what they lacked in wisdom. They let a great American city drown and let an entire country down. Worst of all, they “led the nation to war on false premises.”
More than 4.000 American troops have been killed in Iraq and more than 30,000 wounded. There have been upwards of 100,000 casualties among Iraqi civilians.
Off the battlefield, what has been sacrificed, along with our treasure, is adherence to the rule of law.
From the Civil War to Vietnam, abuse of power has occurred in time of war. Abraham Lincoln suspended habeas corpus during the Civil War. During Vietnam, we had J. Edgar Hoover’s counter-intelligence program, called COINTELPRO. Using the perceived threat of communism as the excuse, the FBI tried to disrupt the civil rights movement and to smear Martin Luther King. They not only wanted him discredited, they wanted him dead, threatening him with the release of damaging information if he did not commit suicide.
We thought we had put a stop to these kinds of spies and lies, but that was before September 11. Before wiretapping without warrants. Before torture. Before the abolition of habeas corpus rights for detainees. Before the Supreme Court stopped the Bush Administration an unprecedented four times from making a bonfire of the Constitution.
There has been abuse of power elsewhere, too. After eight years of this Administration, we are going to need another reconstruction – reconstruction of a government which has been purposefully dismantled, privatized and politicized.
Just weeks ago the Justice Department’s own Inspector General and its Office of Professional Responsibility issued a report confirming some of our worst fears about the oxymoronic Bush Justice Department.
Their report found the Department used “political or ideological” factors even in recruiting interns, but more importantly, in its honors program from which comes the nucleus of its cadre of career lawyers. “Social justice" was a “buzz word” that disqualified applicants. This “constituted misconduct and also violated the department’s policies and civil service law.”
And here what has been sacrificed is civil rights enforcement. Again, this is not the first time that the NAACP has had to cope with an administration that is hostile to civil rights.
Of 20th Century presidents, only Lyndon Johnson can be said to have distinguished himself on race. Most of the others pursued racist policies to attract white votes. Abandonment of black rights and acquiescence to racist sensibilities was the organizing principle of their politics.
Theodore Roosevelt, the 26th President and the first of the 20th Century, believed in a genetic hierarchy with whites on top and blacks on the bottom.
The first Southerner elected since the Civil War, Virginian Woodrow Wilson, enjoyed telling “darkie” jokes in dialect, purged black office holders and institutionalized segregation in the federal civil service.
Franklin Roosevelt’s Secretary of the Interior, Harold Ickes, had been President of the Chicago NAACP, and his Attorney General, Frank Murphy, had been an NAACP Board member, but President Roosevelt considered the NAACP a nuisance. He and his wife called blacks “darkies”, but persistent courting by Walter White and Roy Wilkins turned her into a champion of human rights. In his four terms in the White House Roosevelt never advocated a single piece of civil rights legislation nor scarcely spoke a single word against Jim Crow. Only A. Philip Randolph’s threat of 100,000 black people marching on Washington in 1941 forced Roosevelt to issue the first presidential directive on race since Reconstruction, Executive Order 8802, prohibiting discrimination in defense industries and establishing a Fair Employment Practices Commission.
Roosevelt’s successor, Harry Truman, reduced the FEPC to a fact-finding agency, taking away its “cease and desist” powers. But when the NAACP assembled a group to discuss a series of southern racial atrocities, the President rose from his chair and said, “My God! I had no idea it was as terrible as all that! We’ve got to do something!” He issued Executive Order 9808, creating the President’s Committee on Civil Rights.
In March, 1947, before a crowd of 10,000, Truman became the first President to speak at an NAACP gathering. In October, the President’s Committee released its report, To Secure These Rights, containing 35 sweeping recommendations, including a permanent civil rights division in the Department of Justice and a permanent Commission on Civil Rights. The following year Truman called on Congress to outlaw lynching and the poll tax and to make existing civil rights laws stronger. His Executive Order 9981 eliminated segregation in the armed forces.
President Dwight Eisenhower told “nigger jokes” to the men around him on the campaign trail and later in the White House. He objected to his Department of Justice filing a brief in support of the NAACP plaintiffs in Brown v. Board of Education and personally lobbied Chief Justice Warren to rule against them. He said the court decision integrating Montgomery’s buses and ending the year-long boycott was “a backward step” and contrary to his states’ rights views. There was no White House action when Autherine Lucy faced mobs to try to integrate the University of Alabama. And when 14-year-old Emmett Till was lynched in what J. Edgar Hoover called “an alleged murder” in Money, Mississippi, the President ignored telegrammed pleas from Till’s mother for justice.
Eisenhower’s 1956 Democratic opponent, Adlai Stevenson, was even less sympathetic to civil rights. His only civil rights initiative was a call for a year-long moratorium on what he called “racial agitation.” Saying he was “sick of the clamor of the NAACP”, he could not understand why Roy Wilkins and Walter White expected more from him than from President Eisenhower.
John F. Kennedy, like Franklin Roosevelt, was a patrician who came to the White House with little knowledge of black people and fewer black friends. He won election with black votes, however, helped especially by a leaflet distributed in black precincts that promoted his supportive telephone call to Coretta Scott King after her husband was arrested and held in a Georgia prison.
It took the escalating civil rights movement to force him and his administration into any action. They integrated public transportation, took the right side in a dozen school desegregation lawsuits, and filed fourteen voting rights suits.
But they also appointed racist federal judges, stuck to a “no-arrest policy” for routine violence against civil rights workers, cut deals with segregationists, and unleashed the FBI – which needed little encouragement – on the civil rights movement.
And the President of the United States called members of the organization I worked for then, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), “sons of bitches.”
In Kennedy’s second year in office, the riot over James Meredith’s admission to Ole Miss gave him a chance to act, and he did. Moved by the ferocity of white southern opposition to civil rights and the determination of the black movement, the administration eventually introduced what would become the Civil Rights Act of 1964.
Within six days of Kennedy’s death, Lyndon Johnson met with the NAACP’s Roy Wilkins, the Urban League’s Whitney Young, labor leader A. Philip Randolph, SNCC’s John Lewis, and CORE’s James Farmer and promised them he would pass Kennedy’s civil rights bill. He did.
Another civil rights crisis spurred him into action in 1965 – the beatings at the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma coincided with Johnson’s plan to introduce and pass a comprehensive voting rights bill. The President used the emotion stirred by Selma to rally Congress to pass his bill.
Richard Nixon’s 1968 and 1972 presidential campaigns were premised on destroying the Democratic Party’s successful winning coalition – southern white Democrats, black voters nationwide, and organized labor – by creating race-based divisions among them. He promised the resistant white South selective or non-existent enforcement of school desegregation, fought against re-authorization of the Voting Rights Act, and nominated pro-segregation federal judges.
The Nixon Administration designed a welfare reform plan to deliberately appeal to organized labor and repulse black voters. Nixon aide John Erlichman said later, “Before long, the AFL-CIO and the NAACP were locked in combat over one of the passionate issues of the day and the Nixon Administration was located in the sweet and reasonable middle … .”
As a Congressman, Gerald Ford was criticized by the NAACP for leading the 1966 and 1968 fights against open housing legislation in the House. In his short tenure as President he tried a milder version of Nixon’s southern strategy.
The 39th President, Jimmy Carter, came to office with endorsements from Andrew Young and Martin Luther King Sr., but lost much of his black support when he fired Young from his position as United Nations Ambassador. Carter’s administration lost more support when it publicly dithered over whether to support a major affirmative action case, Bakke v. Board of Regents.
Ronald Reagan began his campaign with a pledge to support “states’ rights” in Philadelphia, Mississippi, where three civil rights workers had been killed in 1964. He had already received an endorsement from the Ku Klux Klan. Reagan called the 1964 Civil Rights Act “bad legislation” and the 1965 Voting Rights Act “humiliating to the South.”
We fared much better under the man who liked to be called “the first black president,” but then we watched him try to bring down the man who would be the real first black president.
And then we dealt with George W. Bush, who made his father, who did little for civil rights, seem like a champion of freedom. The son spoke to us as president only once and his administration failed to pursue discrimination cases, prosecute hate crimes, or protect the right to vote.
Having done little to earn black votes, the President and his party have done much to suppress them. This past term the Justice Department filed a brief urging the Supreme Court to uphold an Indiana voter ID law and the Court did, even though the opinion stated that it was “fair to infer that partisan considerations may have played a significant role” in enacting the law and even though Indiana admitted that there had not been a single case of voter impersonation in the state’s history.
So we face an ever growing plethora of state laws designed to restrict voting rights, all of which disproportionately affect would-be black voters. In Indiana, for example, 22 percent of black voters lack proper identification, compared to 16 percent of white voters.
A 2006 study by Project Vote found that a shocking 39 percent of eligible blacks and 46 percent of eligible Latinos were not registered to vote. Among whites, the unregistered percentage was 29.
It is our patriotic duty to register as many voters as possible and to get them to the polls, and we vow to answer that call to duty.
We are very encouraged that the 2008 primary campaign saw across-the-board increases in voter turnout. Blacks and youth increased their share of the Democratic primary electorate by 25 percent over 2004.
A record 6.5 million voters younger than 30 voted in this year’s primaries and caucuses, becoming an influential voting bloc that leans progressive.
We at the NAACP also boast an influential youth vote – the seven members of our National Board of Directors who occupy seats reserved for young adults under age 25. It was our youth board members, acting on behalf of the NAACP’s Youth and College Division, who initiated our October 2002 resolution against going to war in Iraq.
National survey data document that each new generation is more tolerant than the one preceding it and that each generation has become increasingly more tolerant as it ages. Overall, nine in 10 whites say they would be comfortable with a black presidency.
I believe these attitudes have everything to do with the successful civil rights movement and the work the NAACP has waged for almost 100 years.
That work infuses every election, given the lasting importance of the Voting Rights Act of 1965, but it has been especially evident this year. The Civil Rights Act of 1964 made discrimination based on race, gender, ethnicity or religion illegal. Another act soon followed making discrimination based on age illegal. The major candidates in both sides’ primaries this year included a black, a woman, an Hispanic, a Mormon, and a man, now his party’s presumptive nominee, who would be the oldest person elected to the presidency.
All of these candidates – and the nation – owe a debt to what Taylor Branch has called “the modern founders of democracy”, those who labored in the vineyard of civil rights.
Ironically, while one side’s white males slugged it out, the other side’s contest devolved into a race versus gender war. As Keli Goff writes, “While some white women were treated as property during the 19th Century, most black women [and men] were property… .”
The complicated history, with its attendant tension, of the relationship between the fighters for civil rights and the fighters for women’s rights goes back to the Civil War. Inseparable allies before the war, abolitionists and some suffragists split over who should get the vote first after the war.
Reacting to the fact that the 15th Amendment gave black men the right to vote but omitted all women, the women’s rights pioneer, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, railed:
“The representative women of the nation have done their utmost for the last thirty years to secure freedom for the Negro, and so long as he was lowest in the scale of being we were willing to press his claims; but now, as the celestial gate to civil rights is slowly moving on its hinges, it becomes a serious question whether we had better stand aside and see ‘Sambo’ walk into the kingdom first.”
Of course, the reality was that, the 15th Amendment notwithstanding, black men and women were prevented from voting – and died trying – until the 1960s.
As Hendrik Hertzberg writes of today’s tensions:
“Competitions among grievances do not ennoble…; but it does not belittle the oppressions of gender to suggest that in America oppressions of race have cut deeper. … the Constitution did not extend the vote to women until half a century after it extended it to men of color. But there is no gender equivalent of the nightmare of disenfranchisement, lynching, apartheid, and peonage that followed Reconstruction, to say nothing of ‘the bondsman’s two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil’ that preceded it.”
Rather than declare a winner in the oppression sweepstakes, the lesson we ought to take away from the Democratic primaries is that we are not “living in a post-feminist wonderland in which all that stands in women’s path is women themselves.” Nor does Senator Obama’s candidacy herald a post-civil rights America, any more than his victory in November will mean that race as an issue has been vanquished in America.
Race dictates where we live, how we live, and how long we live.
Almost every social indicator, from birth to death, reflects black-white disparities. Infant mortality rates are 146 percent higher for blacks; chances of imprisonment are 447 percent higher; rate of death from homicide 521 percent higher; lack of health insurance 42 percent more likely; the proportion with a college degree 60 percent lower. And the average white American will live 5 ½ years longer than the average black American.
In his speech following Hurricane Katrina, President Bush spoke of the “deep persistent poverty” which exists in our country. “That poverty”, he said, “has its roots in a history of racial discrimination.”
The truth is that race trumps class. As Michael Dyson has written, “[c]oncentrated poverty doesn’t victimize poor whites in the same way it victimizes poor blacks.”
W. E. B. DuBois, one of the founders of the NAACP, was the first social scientist to link class to race. He understood then as we must now: “race never stands apart from economic realities.”
Plutarch well before him warned that “an imbalance between rich and poor is the oldest and most fatal ailment of all republics.” Today we live in a nation where the top one percent has more wealth than the bottom 90 percent combined. And where black families’ median net worth is only 14.6 percent of white families’.
The fragility of middle class life for black Americans is illustrated by their downward mobility. Nearly half of blacks born into the middle class 40 years ago have descended into poverty or near poverty as adults compared to only 16 percent of whites.
Homeownership rates for blacks, already low, are sinking under the weight of the subprime mortgage crisis, which “stands to likely be the largest loss of African-American wealth that we have ever seen, wiping out a generation of home wealth building.” Blacks are three times more likely to have subprime loans than whites, with such loans accounting for 55 percent of loans to blacks and only 17 percent of loans to whites.
This has not happened by accident. There is evidence that “[minority] neighborhoods were actually targeted – that lenders have gone after people whom they think are less sophisticated borrowers….”
One study that analyzed almost 180,000 subprime loans found that borrowers of color were more than 30 percent more likely than white borrowers to receive a higher-rate loan, even after taking differences in creditworthiness into account. Another study revealed that high-income blacks were three times more likely to receive a subprime mortgage than low-income white borrowers.
Of course, discriminatory lending is not confined to the subprime market. And it doesn’t just victimize individuals; it affects entire families and communities.
Last July the NAACP filed a class action lawsuit against 17 of the nation’s largest lenders, alleging discriminatory lending practices. Two weeks ago, on July 2, we held a national “Day of Action” to demand that lenders eliminate discriminatory policies and practices and make amends for their past conduct.
All of this is occurring as we mark the 40th anniversary of the Fair Housing Act of 1968. Then, as now, we faced housing segregation that was the deliberate creation of official policies and practices of the United States.
New York, Chicago, San Francisco, Richmond, San Diego, Columbus, and Pittsburgh all had only limited patterns of housing segregation in the early twentieth century.
Gunnar Myrdal demonstrated that, as late as the 1930s, fewer than 5 percent of residential blocks in northern cities were occupied exclusively by non-whites. W. E. B. DuBois' study of Philadelphia saw blacks living in every ward of that city as late as 1897, and my uncle, J. Max Bond, wrote of similar dispersal patterns in Los Angeles in 1890.
But as white flight began to populate the new suburbs, racial zoning strung a white noose around the inner city, an invisible cord which kept Asians and blacks out.
When Jim Crow zoning was declared illegal in 1917, restrictive covenants followed. White developers and homeowners agreed not to sell or rent to non-whites, and the white noose around black neighborhoods grew tighter. Before these devices were found unconstitutional in 1948, they had created two housing markets -- one for whites and another for blacks.
Then the federal government became a more active participant in the drive to create two separate Americas. The Federal Housing Administration (FHA), HUD's predecessor, required racial restrictions in New Deal home ownership insurance programs.
A 1935 FHA underwriting manual made it clear. What the federal government called "inharmonious racial or nationality groups" were to be discouraged from moving into all-white communities.
The Interstate Highway System gave the states money which made white flight to segregated suburbs easier, and other federal grants - for sewage, electric power, and open space - were given to discriminating suburban towns on the urban fringe.
Highways, sewers, and power transmission lines encouraged the spread of industry away from the city, as did the lower price of land, and the ebony urbanite left behind found fewer jobs and fewer services as tax levels dropped as well.
Public housing programs began to destroy older, integrated neighborhoods and replace them with segregated buildings which offered the least shelter at the lowest cost. Urban renewal, of course, has been “negro removal” from its inception in 1949.
And minority neighborhoods have been built on a foundation of institutionalized discrimination in the real estate and banking industries. Their pilings are individual prejudice and discrimination. And their co-builder has been the federal government itself – from the FHA and its predecessor agencies, where discrimination in home lending originated, to the creation of white suburbs through mortgage interest deductions and the denial of credit to inner cities; from the promotion of white flight by the placement of highways to the use of urban renewal and public housing to isolate blacks.
It has always been one thing to work next to a black person and other thing to live next to one.
As the price of its passage, the 1968 Fair Housing Act was designed not to work. Its ban on discrimination in housing was destined to be an empty promise. As one commentator put it, “[W]hat Congress did was hatch a beautiful bird without wings to fly.”
As passed, the bill contained no enforcement powers. It would be 20 years until the 1988 amendments gave the nation and its citizens a fair housing bill whose promises were capable of being fulfilled.
But legislative changes alone cannot create an integrated, bias-free America. Today the typical white resident of a metropolitan area lives in a neighborhood that is 80 percent white, while the typical black resident’s neighborhood is 51% black.
And it is estimated that “[t]here are least four million acts of housing discrimination every year.”
The history of the freedom struggle is a never ending fight between right and wrong.
As evil has been consistent, so has good. As evil has sought privilege for the few, good has insisted on peace and prosperity for the many. And the movement for racial and economic justice has fought its battles on a variety of fronts, choosing each as circumstances dictated, changing and adapting its means and methods to the situations it confronted.
As we continue to fight the battles -- in housing, in education, in employment, we may want to remember my slave-born grandfather's hopeful words.
Speaking in 1901, he said:
"The false partitions set up to separate classes and races are falling down. Illogical and un-Christian distinctions, though still disgracing the age and hampering the spirit of progress must soon yield to justice and right. ... Then forward in the struggle for advancement."
"Wrong for a time may seem to prevail and the good already accomplished seem to be overthrown. But forward in the struggle, inspired by the achievements of the past, sustained by a faith that knows no faltering, forward in the struggle."
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(Julian Bond has been Chairman of the NAACP Board of Directors since February 1998. He is a Distinguished Scholar in the School of Government at American University in Washington, DC, and a Professor in the Department History at the University of Virginia.)
i A 2007 poll conducted by Penn, Schoen & Berland found that the NAACP had the highest favorability rating of 17 organizations working in the civil rights arena. The NAACP is viewed favorably by most blacks – 94% including 70 percent who view it very favorably, and by three-quarters of the general public. Fully 93 percent of blacks surveyed believe the NAACP represents the interests of the African-American community, and 67 percent believe this strongly. A 1993 leadership study by Brakeley, John Price Jones, Inc., showed 75% of blacks believed the NAACP the leader among groups with civil rights, social justice and race relations agendas. In this study, 75% of all respondents believed the NAACP adequately represented the black community. An October 1995 US News and World Report poll reported 90% of blacks supported the NAACP. In an April 1998 poll conducted by the Foundation for Ethnic Understanding, 81% of blacks reported a favorable opinion of the NAACP. The NAACP is profoundly democratic. “Nationally, the NAACP (of all black civil rights/political organizations) is governed by its individually based membership.” In Class Notes by Adolph Reed, The New Press, New York.
ii Fergus M. Bordewich, “History’s Tangled Threads,” The New York Times (Feb. 2, 2007).
Taylor Branch, “King’s Nonviolence: Asleep after 40 Years?” (March 31, ’08).
iii Martin Luther King, Jr., “The Domestic Impact of the War in Vietnam” (January 11, 1967).
v Bill Moyers, Moyers on Democracy.
vi Howard Zinn, You Can’t Be Neutral on a Moving Train, Beacon Press (1994).
vii Thomas Friedman, “Anxious in America,” The New York Times, p. 10 (June 29, 2008).
viii Senate Select Committee on Intelligence (June 6, 2008 Report).
ix Eric Lichtblau, “Report Assails Political Hiring in Justice Dept.,” The New York Times, p. 1A (June 25, 2008).
x Kenneth O’Reilly, Nixon’s Piano, p. 117, The Free Press (1995).
xi Id. at 166.
xii Id. at 176.
xiii Crawford v. Marion County Elections Board, ____US____ (April 28, 2008).
xiv “Supreme Court Voter ID Decision Legalizes Voter Disenfranchisement,” Project Vote News (April 28, 2008).
xv Washington Post-ABC News Poll (June 12 – 15, 2008).
xvi Branch, id.
xvii Keli Goff, “Oops, She Did it Again: An Open Letter to Gloria Steinem,” The Huffington Post (January 12, 2008).
xviii Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Letter (December 26, 1865).
xix Hendrik Hertzberg, The New Yorker, p. 22 (June 23, 2008).
xx Katha Politt, The Nation (June 5, 2008).
xxi Imprisonment rates from U. S. Department of Justice, Office of Justice Programs, Bureau of Justice Statistics. All other statistics from compilation of statistics from the U. S. Census Bureau, Statistical Abstract of the United States: 2004-2005.
xxii Michael Eric Dyson, Come Hell or High Water, p. 145, Basic Civitas Books (2006).
xxiii W. E. B. DuBois, The Philadelphia Negro, p. 394 (1899).
xxiv National Fair Housing Alliance (NFHA), 2008 Fair Housing Trends Report, p. 24 (April 8, 2008).
xxv Shankar Vedantam, “Subprime Mortgages and Race: A Bit of Good News May Be Illusory,” The Washington Post, p. A2 (June 30, 2008).
xxvi NFHA Report, id. at 22.
xxvii Id.
xxviii George R. Metcalf, Fair Housing Comes of Age, p. 86, Greenwood Press (New York) (1988).
xxix NFHA Report, id. at 12-13.
xxx Id . at 2.
xxxi James Bond, "Address of Reverend James Bond," Berea Quarterly (February, l901).
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