A Movie with Eyes on the Wrong Prize: “Mississippi Burning”

By Julian Bond

Vol. 10, No. 6, 1988, pp. 22-23

The new movie “Mississippi Burning” is the worst example of the genre called docudrama: there is no documentation and very little drama. Instead, filmgoers see “Rambo Meets the Ku Klux Klan” as cardboard characters parade through a small Mississippi town in 1964.

The filmmakers are quick to let the audience know their effort is a dramatization, based on the FBI investigation into the disappearance and deaths of Mickey Schwerner, Andrew Goodman, and James Chaney outside Philadelphia, Miss., in June 1964.

But the picture of the FBI, the civil rights movement, and white Southerners which emerges places “Mississippi Burning” as close to Freedom Summer as Lillian Smith’s

---

Page 23

Strange Fruit is to a basket of avocados.

No one emerges whole from this film.

The FBI, which hardly endeared itself to movement activists, is shown committing crimes beyond the imagination of its worse critics.

The civil rights workers–look-a-likes for Schwerner, Goodman, and Chaney–appear only long enough to be murdered in the first five minutes. The rest of the film is given over to cardboard caricatures of dark-suited, buttoned-up federal agents and loutish Klansmen, punctuated with enough burnings, beatings, and bombings to have destroyed a town of Philadelphia’s size.

The Klan members are ignorant lumps and the FBI agents slow-witted, if well-meaning, fools. The former confound the latter by dumping a black beating victim from a speeding car in the town square at high noon.

When regular police techniques and massive searches fail to dent the wall of white silence erected by the trio’s murders, the FBI resorts to two kidnappings, a faked lynching, a clumsy seduction, and–most incredible of all–a threatened castration of the town’s kidnapped mayor by a black FBI agent. There were, of course, no black FBI agents in 1964. In truth, the FBI bought information about the murders for $30,000 from an informant.

Mississippi was at war in 1964. The one thousand mostly white summer volunteers who joined the permanent staffs of SNCC, CORE, and SCLC in voter registration and Freedom Schools across the state poised a real challenge to the white supremacists, who responded with arson and murder. Eighty civil rights workers were assaulted; over a thousand were jailed. Several unidentified black bodies were found in the search for Goodman, Schwerner, and Chaney; one was wearing a CORE tee-shirt.

The FBI was stiff-necked and most often allied with local lawmen. The agents did announce their presence through their uniformed suits and shoes and their Northern ways and seemed more interested in watching the law being broken than seeing it enforced. Their investigations centered on political thought, not the denial of civil rights.

But “Mississippi Burning” takes that frightening summer and makes it surreal and unbelievable.

And it invites the movie audience to believe that the FBI cared enough about the missing trio to use the Klan’s tactics against the Klan, and that the summer’s heroes were dressed in blue serge, not blue jeans.

The true lesson of Freedom Summer is told in the stories of the volunteers and the young, full-time civil rights professionals and the nameless Mississippians who housed and sheltered them, took beatings and blows for them. Nearly all the volunteers were white, and nearly all their hosts were black, but some few white Mississippians stood up, too. “Mississippi Burning” cheapens them all. Instead of dramatizing the real heroics of a critical time in American history, it is a made-up story with made-up people about a time and place which never existed.

There are those who argue that movies like “Mississippi Burning,” as awful as they are, are preferable in an age in which most Americans absorb history from small and large screens.

That is precisely this movie’s main affront.

It enters a popular culture where 1964 is as remote as 1776 and where lessons are learned from flickering film instead of the fumed page or the award-winning documentary. It becomes the history it parodies; a friend’s date told me excitedly, “Billy says these things really happened back then.”

She is thirty-five.

One of “Mississippi Burning’s” stars is already being touted for an Oscar nomination; the FBI agent he portrays is a former Mississippi sheriff, a good-old-boy with a red-blooded American heart. His desire to catch the killers overrides his respect for the law. The makers of Mississippi Burning” let their desire for a big box office and Oscars overcome respect for history. They had their eyes on the wrong prize.

Julian Bond, currently visiting professor in history and politics at Drexel University in Philadelphia, Penn., is a member of the Southern Regional Council.

The Vote and Change

Julian Bond

Vol. 12, No. 2, 1990, p. 4-9

These edited remarks are from a panel discussion held on political participation during last winter’s annual meeting of the Southern Regional Council. The participants, all with long involvement in the drive to expand political participation, included former SNCC leader and Georgia State Senator Julian Bond, former Little Rock mayor Lottie Shackelford, former Alabama legislator and national Democratic Party operative Tony Harrison and Texas voting rights activist Andrew Hernandez. All are members of the Southern Regional Council, Harrison and Shackelford are former presidents of the organization. Bond narrated the program, which was taped for television broadcast and is available on videocassette from the SRC.

JULIAN BOND: Ms. Shackelford, let’s begin with you. You were a high school student in Little Rock in 1954 when the Supreme Court said that separate but equal was against the law. Many believe that’s the beginning of the modern civil rights movement and the present day emphasis on the right-to-vote. What are your recollections of the political scene in Arkansas at that time?

LOTTIE SHACKELFORD: I think that Daisy Bates would be the first to say that she was merely trying to make certain that all students, particularly black students, had equal access for educational opportunities. And while the Court decision came down in ’54, the Little Rock schools went back and forth for three years as to when and how they were going to integrate. Then in 1957, of course, we had the Little Rock Nine who actually did integrate Central High School.

A lot of folk have asked, “Why nine?” I tell them that the number started off being 250, but as each year would pass, the number would drop. Some students no longer wanted to be a part. Some parents were being threatened about their children participating. So on that day in September 1957, there were only nine students still willing to go. Had the date been put off even one more day, we may have had eight or seven. But that did start an awakening-not just in Little Rock and the South-about what was needed to bring about equality and justice for all.

BOND: A moment ago you remarked that your father sold poll taxes, and a great many people won’t understand what that meant. What did you mean?

SHACKELFORD: You needed a poll tax to be eligible to vote. As opposed to registering to vote, you bought a poll tax.

BOND: How much did it cost?

SHACKELFORD: One dollar, at that time which was quite a bit of money. And I helped him sell poll tax receipts.

---

Page 5

BOND: So he would buy a quantity and then sell them back to potential voters?

SHACKELFORD: Right. He always believed that folks should exercise their right to vote. And, that was his way of making a contribution. He’d go into the rural areas outside Little Rock and sell those poll tax receipts. Go into churches and neighborhoods.

That’s one of the things that black folk in Little Rock were quite complacent about at that time. In their view they didn’t feel they were being denied so much. And, I think that’s another reason the impact of the desegregation crisis in ’57 had such a meaning there. Too many people were satisfied with the way things were going. While in rural areas black folk were saying they could not vote, in Little Rock, if you bought a poll tax receipt, you could vote.

Somehow or another they saw that as equality because white folk couldn’t vote either without a poll tax receipt.

BOND: Do you recall any fear accompanying your father’s efforts when you got outside Little Rock, out in rural Arkansas? Do you remember people being afraid to buy a poll tax?

SHACKELFORD: No, but then he never ventured much farther than the central Arkansas area. He didn’t get down into the Delta area.

BOND: Mr. Harrison, you’re an Alabama native and it is in Alabama, and Selma particularly, in 1965 that a massive demonstration resulted, finally, in the passage of the Voting Rights Act from which stem most of the political protections evident about us all over the United States for a wide variety of groups today. What are your recollections of the period before ’65 leading up to the Selma-Montgomery march?

TONY HARRISON: I was too young to have a personal recollection of that. But my grandfather was a voter. And, he was a teacher and minister. My fondest recollection of him is not about voting, but about his reading. He was always reading. In the summer he would be sitting on the porch after he had done his chores, and he would be trying to read the paper and I would be up trying to disturb him from his reading. He’d just ignore me and keep right on going.

BOND: As an Alabama state Iegislator, you helped reapportion the state legislature, did you not?

HARRISON: I had watched very carefully the reapportionment process in 1970 and ’74. And subsequently I ran for the legislature and won. So I was active in the process following the 1980 Census in which we expanded the base of participation from that in ’74.

BOND: Could you have helped to create additional black representatives in the Alabama state house and senate had it not been for the Selma movement in ’65 and even what had happened in Little Rock in 1957?

HARRISON: I don’t think there was any political participation of any significance in the South. The South was very clear that the poll tax represented a process for the denial of the franchise to all but primarily white males. So without the Selma march which brought the Voting Rights Act, my own participation would not have been possible. Once we got the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of ’65, we also had the litigating process that brought one-man one-vote and which then turned out to be the basis for all of the redistricting. If I’m not mistaken, that comes out of Tuskegee, Alabama.

BOND: A natural turn to Mr. Hernandez, whose organization works primarily with Hispanics in the southwestern part of the United States. It was 1972 that the Voting Rights Act was extended to cover Hispanics. What did that extension mean to the kind of work that you do now? Could it have happened without this extension, this widening of the pool, in effect?

ANDREW HERNANDEZ: Absolutely not. In the same way that the passage of the Voting Rights Act opened up the doors of political opportunity for blacks in the South, where they went from 2-3 percent of the electorate to 30 percent of the electorate in some of the states, with extension of the Voting Rights Act to Hispanics in the Southwest beginning in the early ’70s, we saw a dramatic change in Hispanic participation. As the barriers came down, Hispanic participation went up.

In the same way that blacks went from a people who couldn’t participate because they were shut out of the process, Hispanics went from a group who had the lowest registration rate and the lowest turnout rate in the country of any other group in the early ’70s to in the ’80s a group that has the highest registration and turnout rate. Frankly, prior to the extension of the Voting Rights Act to Hispanics, at a time when the population was literally booming, the actual number of Hispanics registered to vote went down. That’s pretty hard, to be tripling your population and actually go down in the number of people registered to vote.

BOND: Why did that happen?

HERNANDEZ: There was an induced apathy in our community. It was induced by an array of election devices

---

Page 6

that shut Hispanics out of the political process; for instance, gerrymandering. When we first started our work in 1974, I was given the assignment to look at why Hispanics couldn’t win where they were in the majority. There were sixty-seven counties we identified in Texas that should have elected [Hispanic] county officials but that had not. That’s pretty distressing and we tended to blame our own people for it.

And when you got the leadership together and asked why we couldn’t win, somehow the finger was always pointed at apathy. That they were too poor to be organized.

What we found in those sixty-seven counties was that every single one of them was gerrymandered. The lines were drawn in such a way that Hispanics couldn’t win, no matter how much they registered, no matter how much they voted. When people were saying their vote didn’t count, they were telling the truth. The system had been set up to insure that their vote didn’t count.

BOND: What about other barriers? We heard Ms. Shackelford talk about the poll tax. What about other exclusionary barriers?

HERNANDEZ: We faced the annual registration for the poll tax. But another barrier unique to Hispanics was learning English. A large number of our older citizens weren’t afforded the opportunity to learn English. When they were growing up and when they were working they knew as much English as they needed to know to pick up people’s clothes, to clean their houses and take care of their children, and to cut their yards.

They didn’t figure they needed any more English than that. So having the ballot printed in English only denied people their citizenship. People who had sent their children to war, had paid their taxes all these years, and been faithful to American ideals but who had never been given a chance to learn English. When-under the Voting Rights Act-bilingual ballots were printed, our participation increased.

We also started attacking by litigating. We had filed lawsuits and were victorious in voting rights cases. When our people started winning at a local level and they started seeing change our participation went up.

In the Southwest the number of Hispanic elected officials increased from 1,500 in 1976 to close to 4,000 today. In Texas, one of the Southern states that we are talking about, we went from about 700 elected officials in 1974 to 1,600 today. We’ve doubled the number of voters, we’ve doubled the number of elected officials. I think that in Texas and in Florida you’re not going to win statewide elections unless you capture a significant part of the Hispanic vote.

BOND: And what has it meant to the general public in the states where you work to enfranchise this large segment of the population that formerly was just shut out; what difference does it make? If I were a devil’s advocate here: who cares? What difference does it make if Hispanics vote, if their lines are drawn properly?

HERNANDEZ: Well, in a democracy, anytime you have a large portion of the population shut off and alienated from the political system, that population, pretty soon, is going to try to bring down that system. They have no part in it, no share in it. Democratic institutions are fed and nurtured by people’s participation.

But there’s another issue that has to do with the fact that Hispanics bring energy, skills, and wisdom to this country. The other side of it, let’s say we don’t do anything. Let’s say we don’t integrate people, we don’t give them an opportunity. In Texas, by the year 2025, blacks and Hispanics will make up a majority of the population.

Are you going to have a majority of the population shut out economically, politically, and culturally from the life of that state?

HARRISON: In Alabama, the relegation of blacks to a second-class citizenship economically has denied growth to that state. If you look at the gaps between white income, black income, and Hispanic income across the region and the nation, you see lost economic opportunity. You can’t buy a house, you can’t feed your children, you can’t buy health care, you can’t clothe your family. That has relegated this society to a slower growth. We have a third-world nation living in the midst of the wealth of America. Racism continues to be the determinant of not only political but economic decisions. Racism is just a hell of a thing.

HERNANDEZ: I think the first stage in a people’s development is always the acquisition of power. The second stage is the exercise of power. I think we’ve gotten pretty

---

Page 7

good at moving into the acquisition of political power. But we’re still learning our way on how we as minorities exercise that power.

BOND: 1990 is the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Selma march and the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Voting Rights Act. What does tomorrow hold? We see David Dinkins in New York, Douglas Wilder in Virginia–are these aberrations? Are we going to see more dark faces in unfamiliar places? What’s going to happen next?

HERNANDEZ: There’s no question that we will see more blacks being elected and we’ll see Hispanics being governors within this decade, and perhaps some black and Hispanic senators.

I think that the challenge for the ’90s is to exercise the power. For a long time our politics was protest politics, meaning you try to stop that thing from happening to you. It’s a redress of grievance, Well, that’s the politics that you’re involved in when you’re not on the inside. And we still need to do that.

But there’s another politics that’s emerging within the Hispanic community. In Texas we say, “dance with the one that brought you.” And what brought us was voter registration. What brought us were the Voting Rights Act lawsuits, and we have to be vigilant about that. What bought us was the commitment of black and Hispanic leaders and families and parents to do something better for their community and their children. We can’t leave that behind.

At the same time, we need to make sure that we start paying attention to the time when we will be the majority. By 2010, 30 percent of all the children in America will be minority children. In the five largest states in this country, minority children will be the new majority. That’s within our lifetime. When my boy is my age, he could be living in a state in which a majority of the people there are Hispanic. We need to prepare ourselves for being the majority and that means proposing from public policy perspective things that make our society more opportunity-filled, freer and more just.

The whole process is still very much alive and well in the black communities. The realities of our politics in northern cities is often still based upon that kind of participation. In 1991 after the census is taken and the new line-drawing process begins, we will come to the table with knowledge about what reapportionment is. We know how to try to make it work for us. I think we’re going to see an expansion of black, Hispanic and other minority participation during the 1990s and the redrawing process that will follow the 1990 census will lay foundations for that expansion.

BOND: Ms. Shackelford, let me shift gears a little bit and come to you. Your biography says you are the first woman mayor of Little Rock. We hear now about a woman’s vote. We see women’s preferences influencing decisions in the New York City mayoral race and the Virginia governor’s race. What does this mean?

SHACKELFORD: I think that in the beginning days of the women’s movement when we were fighting for the Equal Rights Amendment to the Constitution, it still wasn’t clearly defined. It was almost pitting one against the other. Say me as a black woman, whether I’m a woman or a black in the sense of how I related to issues. There is no “if, and, or but” about it. The abortion issue is a woman’s issue. And, for the first time now, I think you can see the impact of the woman’s vote, black or white, rich or poor, in the sense of how they are impacting upon elections. And I think the past elections in Virginia and in new York show that.

BOND: You can argue that black women have been much more successful, proportionately anyway than white women. There were at one time, in proportionate number, more black women in the Congress than there were white women. There are a number of black women who have had electoral successes on the lower level. What’s going to happen in black politics in the United States, what new faces are we going to see? Neither Douglas Wilder nor Dave Dinkins is a babe in arms. These are men who have been around in political office for years and years. What new faces, fresh faces,

---

Page 8

female faces are we going to see in the future?

SHACKELFORD: We have not had a black woman governor. We have not had a black woman mayor of a truly major city. We have not had a black woman senator. We have very, very few black women who have found entry into corporate policymaking. You give me an economic chart and black women are still on the bottom; a political chart, we’re still on the bottom.

But, in the sense of new faces on the horizon, I see many more women now because they have had the opportunity or have been forced to be a part of the economic mainstream. Really working to take care of families themselves. Exposed-which means they are more concerned about politics because they understand the relevance of politics and economic well-being. We’re going to see more educated women who will not just focus on careers, but will focus on politics.

BOND: Mr. Hernandez, earlier we were talking about generations in politics. How is the first generation of Hispanics elected in Texas and the first generation of blacks elected in Alabama and Arkansas different from those elected in the last five to ten years?

HERNANDEZ: I think you’ll find two major differences. The first generation of leadership tends to be elected out of communities where the districts or jurisdictions are predominantly black or Hispanic. And as such, they come out of a struggle of protest. The second generation of Ieadership has less of that struggle of protest because the political process has been more accessible to them. But they’re tending to win now in districts where they make up 20 to 30 percent of the population. For example, the mayor’s race in Denver is won in a city where only 13 percent of the population is Hispanic. We see that happening much more. That means that their politics are not going to be as ethnically driven.

The more that women are integrated, the more that Hispanics and blacks are integrated into the national body politic, the more they’re going to be talking about justice, opportunity, and freedom. I think you’re going to see a renaissance in those values coming from segments that have been left out and now are being brought in. Because they are close enough to their history to remember a time when they were excluded, they will be more faithful to keeping the promise for all the citizens.

Once there were folks who said that you shouldn’t give people who don’t own property the right to vote. There were others who said you shouldn’t have freed the slaves, or given women the right to vote. There were folks who said you shouldn’t pay attention to those rabble-rousers in the South in the 1960s who made the promise of the Emancipation Proclamation come true. I think that future generations will look back at this generation that’s in the vanguard of transforming American life and say that this generation stood for what was best in America. And, those that resisted, stood on the wrong side of history.

BOND: Tony Harrison, we see in the headlines all kinds of racial and ethnic conflict, gay bashing, attacks on Asians, attacks on Hispanics, incidents such as Bensonhurst in New York. What does this say to us, twenty-five years after the Civil Rights Movement began?

HARRISON: It says that we are going through some frustrating times. I think Andy touched it when he said that you are sort of at the castle door. I think that there’s a lot of resentment, frustration, and lack of understanding in the white community that is festering.

The fact is that the economy is not generating enough opportunities for America’s people. White folks feel that blacks, Hispanics, and Asians are getting what’s theirs. The fact is that the economy isn’t generating jobs enough for all of us. And white folks are resenting what they see.

I don’t think it speaks negatively to where we are coming from, I think it speaks more to white frustrations. In this context, just the other day I was watching a television piece on eastern Europe. A Solidarity leader was attending a big rally in Chicago. The highest population of Polish people outside of Poland in one city is Chicago. I hope the Poles in Chicago will understand my struggle. Their struggle and my struggle is basically the same. Racism impedes their ability to see that.

Those kids in Bensonhurst were almost first generation Italian emigrants.

Why did they come to America? Freedom, economic opportunity? The same things I want. Racial tensions remain because the society has so segregated us that we have not learned enough about each other or appreciated our respective histories and those are the tensions that we

---

Page 9

are seeing.

I’m hopeful that with the new participation of blacks, Hispanics and Asians we can make this society as vibrant and vital and energetic as it ought to be and can be. We have to continue to pursue the political acquisition of participation and of power. We have to make the schools responsive to educate our children and help them understand that if they are not ready for participation in that society that’s coming in ten years they’re going to be cast aside.

The drug wars in the inner-cities of today are, I think, a direct by-product of the absence of hope and the absence of a sense of the future that these kids are faced with- overbearing pressure built upon generations of exclusion and denial. As long as our children cannot see past the moment that is in front of them, they can’t plan for tomorrow. When they can’t plan for tomorrow, there is no hope.

I think that racism is going to impede this society’s acceptance of the changing reality that Andy described. We’ve got every nation here in America. You can find somebody from every place in the world right here. And those Americans can in fact provide linkages back to South America, back to Spain, back to Europe, back to Africa. And all of the Asian countries are represented here.

But I don’t think we really understand the wealth of human diversity that we have in this nation, because we have been so historically tied into restricting access and restricting participation.

Reflections on Affirmative Action Angst
Reflections of an Affirmative Action Baby, by Steven Carter (Basic Books, 1991).
Reviewed by Julian Bond

Vol. 14, No. 1, 1992, pp. 22-23

Students of race relations have watched with interest the elevation to media prominence of a small cadre of black male conservatives, academics who question the worth and wisdom of racial preference programs in place over the last twenty-five years.

Most often included in the group are Shelby Steele, an English teacher at California State University, Thomas Sowell, an economist at Stanford, and Glen Loury, an economist at Boston University.

Curiously, there is no comparative outpouring of objections to assistance from affirmative action’s greatest beneficiaries, women, both white and black. It may not be coincidental that, among beneficiaries, complaints about affirmative action seem limited, at present, to upwardly mobile black men. Economist Julianne Malveaux argues these men are “exercising their masculinist game-playing prerogatives by closing the door on affirmative action and other social programs.”

They may be engaging in a blackface version of the “Iron John” male-bonding rituals currently in vogue among some white men. In an attempt to reclaim their masculine selves in an increasingly feminine world where race makes qualifications suspect, these victims of affirmative action angst, hands joined in a circle, are pounding on symbolic drums, like the soulmate John Doggett did during the Clarence Thomas hearings.

With some slight deviations, these black male conservatives share a common list of objections against affirmative action and its proponents. And despite their shared complaint that deviance from established civil rights orthodoxy is dangerous, these intrepid warriors have found it rewarding instead. Joining that small circle is more than a passage to male bonding; for these drummers, it is the path out of the jungle to fame, fortune, television appearances, and publishing contracts.

Now comes Steven Carter in Reflections of an Affirmative Action Baby, to add his drumbeats, announcing he too suffers affirmative action angst. He shares with Steele, Sowell, and Loury an unease at preferences that make his appointment to Yale Law School faculty seem to some the result of his black skin color rather than his grey brain cells. With his colleagues around the circle’s fireside, he chides black leadership for holding on to policies white Americans oppose.

Like Steele’s, Carter’s approach is largely anecdotal. Like Steele, he offers little documentation or proof of his assertions, and like all his campus-bound counterparts demonstrates an ignorance of the prevalence of racism in America’s past and present that should deny any of them a position on a history faculty.

But Carter rejects the label “conservative;” as a self-described intellectual, he stands above political arguments.

Sadly for a law professor, he stands against the evidence as well. If only middle-class blacks benefit from affirmative action–and there is no evidence that only they do–why abandon it rather than expand it? If discrimination exists no more, what accounts for differences in black and white incomes, years of education completed, life expectancy? Are these indices of social decay the result of some malignancy unconnected to race? Do others subject to discrimination–women, Jews, Hispanics, gays and lesbians–believe they are targeted individually, or as members of a despised group? Do they react individually–as Carter urges blacks to do–or seek the power that comes from group action? Will whites cease being racists if affirmative action is abolished?

Common to all these victims of affirmative action angst is ignorance of ugly, deep-seated, white racism in America today.

The Center for Democratic Renewal reports that hate-crimes and hate-group membership are increasing. A survey conducted by the National Employment Lawyers Association reports that since a series of 1989 rulings

---

Page 23

by the Supreme Court which overturned eighteen years of civil rights law, minorities and women have greater difficulty obtaining lawyers to take discrimination cases; and when they do secure a lawyer, they have greater difficulty proving discrimination in court. Census data tell us that white men remain twice as likely as black men to hold sales, managerial, or professional positions, and two and a half times as likely to hold any job at all. A national poll released this year shows that a majority of whites believe racial minorities are lazier, less intelligent, more prone to violence, and less patriotic than whites.

A 1988 study by the National Research Council concluded that whites oppose equal treatment for blacks when it would result in “close, frequent, or prolonged social contact.” A 1989 University of Chicago study of residential segregation in ten American cities showed “racial segregation is deeper and more profound than previous attempts to study it had indicated.”

This evidence suggests that white Americans cannot be trusted to make discrimination-free judgments in hiring and university admissions, housings rentals, and sales. Affirmative action is the watchdog that tries to keep them honest.

If ignorance of daily proof of discrimination were not enough, common to each of the new complainants is a total failure to prescribe any cures for these continuing racial disparities beyond the foolish hope that if affirmative action is abandoned, previously bigoted whites will joyously embrace some unspecified programs to solve black joblessness, poverty, and poor education.

In fact, most affirmative action hires are in entry-level, factory-floor jobs, not in the rarer confines where Carter, Steele, Sowell, and Loury toil over their textbooks and word processors. To this observer, black complaints about the delegitimizing of credentials through affirmative action seem to come exclusively from blacks in white collars: lawyers, professors, accountants, and other managers crying and dispirited because their hard earned bona fides are being challenged. No assembly line or construction workers, firefighters, or nurses’ aides seem to worry that some white person thinks they got a job because they are black. Prejudiced whites have been claiming blacks lack qualifications since slavery; some of Carter’s Yale colleagues would question his right to be there absent affirmative action. But if the burden is as great as he and his fellows imagine it to be, one wonders why they don’t resign, and let some better qualified white men take their places?…

Julian Bond is a Visiting Professor at the American and Harvard Universities, and observes the South and the nation from Washington, D.C.

Civil Rights In The Popular Culture

By Julian Bond

Vol. 14, No. 2, 1992, pp. 1-2, 4-7

It was a familiar story with a different twist. On October 3, 1991, members of a white sorority at the University of Alabama attended a campus mixer dressed in blackface, basketballs stuffed in their shirts to imitate pregnancy.

The predilection of Southern white men to dress in black-faced drag had been appropriated by their sisters. Whatever advance against gender stereotyping of bigots this episode may reveal, these Tuscaloosa students were living a minstrel ritual over 150 years old. A century and a half before Amos and Andy, black-faced whites drew humor and instruction from imitations of blacks.

As apologies and a protest march followed public exposure of the Alabama incident, it became one of

---

Page 2

several that demonstrated how pervasive racial imagery in our culture remains. “It is racism,” one white student told the New York Times, “but I don’t think they planned it to be racist.”

On Halloween eve, a white student appeared at a Harvard medical school costume party dressed as Clarence Thomas–in blackface and black robe. A black student asked him to leave, and when he didn’t, gave him a wound requiring eighteen stitches to close.

The students at Alabama probably didn’t plan their actions to be racist; something in their lives and culture, something in their history, instructed them that pregnant black women were figures of fun, and no harm was intended to anyone.

The Atlanta Braves intended no harm either with the “tomahawk chop.” “We’re just having fun,” said one fan. But two teams in Atlanta’s baseball history presaged this year’s slur—the Atlanta Crackers, and the Atlanta Black Crackers of the Southern Negro League. It’s surely no accident that the most offensively named football team–the Redskins–is located in a Southern city, or that the team was the last in professional football to hire a black player.

In our daily lives, other mixed messages are broadcast, absorbed, interpreted, and recast. They come, as we do, from a history of stereotypes and inequality, and they blend media and movement, race and reality, culture and civil rights.

* The author of the sequel to Gone With The Wind found it easiest to dispense with black characters; dialect might be offensive, she said, and it was best to dispatch Mammy to an early grave.

* Senator Jesse Helms (R-NC), the leading warrior in our cultural/political battles, fights funding from the National Endowment for the Arts for photographs featuring frontal nudity of black men, leaving many to wonder whether Helms’s objections are a psychological fig-leaf intended to cover natural endowments he finds threatening.

* One of this season’s most critically acclaimed television shows–“I’ll Fly Away”–is set in the period of great hopefulness in race relations, the late 1950s, just before the activist civil rights movement exploded on the South and nation. The hero’s name–Forrest Bedford–is taken from Nathan Bedford Forrest, the muleskinner who was the leader of the original Ku Klux Klan. Elsewhere on television, the 1990s racial scene is primarily an occasion

---

Page 4

for sit-corn laughs, with jolly, tubby blacks screaming at each other in ebony imitations of the established genre.

* White Southerners fare little belier than blacks; “The Beverly Hillbillies,” “Petticoat Junction,” the “Andy Griffith Show,” and “Green Acres” have been updated to “Designing Women” and “Evening Shade.” Indeed, “I’ll Fly Away” is descended from the movie “To Kill A Mockingbird.” But in today’s incarnation, a passive voice has been given the black character, acknowledging today’s sensibilities and the disproportionate number of blacks who watch television.

* At the July 4th dedication of the new civil rights museum in Memphis, the master and mistress of ceremonies were chosen not from that movement’s rich history of heroes and heroines, but from the world of television. Waving to the crowd, Cybil Shepherd, a Memphis native, and Blair Underwood from “LA Law” basked in the spotlight on the platform, while Daisy Bates watched the proceedings from a wheelchair. Underwood took pains to assure the audience he was sympathetic–“I understand the movement,” he said, “I’ve made two movies about it.”

Against this cultural background, mixed messages also unfold in our political lives.

* On November 9, 1991, the white voters of Louisiana almost elected Nazi Republican Klansman David Duke as governor. Pre-election public opinion surveys revealed that most Louisianians knew his past and did not care.

* The week before, the voters in Mississippi chose a clone of David Duke as governor; Kirk Fordice railed against quotas and called for repeal of the Voting Rights Act. His ad against welfare closed with a photograph of a black woman with a child; something in his culture told him that picture would speak what even he dared not say out loud.

* A series of books and other tracts, written by white neo-liberals, blame blacks and pushy women for the demise of liberalism in the United States. They argue these groups have asked too much too often of our society-anti-black backlash isn’t bigotry, they proclaim, but simply a clash of values between unfair preferences and old-fashioned meritocracy, between a pro-black and pro-female preference present and a 100 percent white male quota past. This lament is quickly oozing into the national political discourse, but unlike David Duke and Kirk Fordice, its proponents are too ashamed to make their argument explicit. Southerners will recognize a familiar cast to this debate; much like the Southern moderate’s position on civil rights in the 1960s, these new

---

Page 5

Bourbons argue that attacks on racism undermine good will and provoke racist reaction.

* A small group of black male academics, in a black-faced Iron John male bonding ritual, chant in unison that affirmative action produces racism, rather than being a reaction against it. Their reward is admission to a charmed circle of success and undeserved preference on op-ed pages, television interview shows, and in newspaper book review columns.

* The news media reports that black-on-black tribal violence continues to plague parts of Africa; in Eastern Europe, “ethnic conflicts”—never “white-on-white violence”–are to blame.

* The President of the United States announces that a proposed law that was a “quota bill” yesterday is not a “quota bill” today. The only change was in the quota of Senators which would vote to uphold the President’s promised veto. That quota shrunk when they discovered the White House had been lying to them–and the American people–about what the bill would do.

* A Supreme Court nominee who had demanded judgment on the basis of his character–not his race–raised the race shield by describing himself as the victim of a “high-tech lynching.” No one stepped forward to remind the nation that no black man was ever lynched for molesting a black woman, or to ask whether his accuser might not have been the victim of a “high-tech rape.” Art immediately imitated life as television’s “Designing Women” based an episode on the characters’ reactions to the clash between Anita Hill and Clarence Thomas, and while in real life Clarence Thomas wins, on television it is clear that Anita Hill was triumphant. Or at least in the small screen’s fiction she was believed.

Color shapes our culture, and culture shapes our politics, and in turn our politics shape our culture. Presidents Bush and Reagan borrow their best lines from movie scripts: “Make My Day” and “Read My Lips.” In so doing, they try to assume the persona of the characters who spoke these lines, the lone warriors fighting to protect a soft world that has surrendered to the others, to women, to minorities.

I teach college students a course on the history of the Southern civil rights movement. They come to the class with preconceived ideas–some true and some not. They know women played a larger role in that movement than most history books admit–they not only know Rosa Parks but also Jo Ann Robinson and Ella Baker–and they know many of the men in the movement wanted women kept comfortably in their place. They believe Malcolm X played a larger personal role in the South than in fact he did. While his politics informed and changed the movement, Southerners almost never saw his person, but my students want him to have been there at King’s side.

They get their information from their culture, from newspapers and magazines, from rap music sampling and celebrating Malcolm X, from new and critical histories of Martin Luther King, from seeing women swell mass meeting crowds and Daisy Bates facing down the President in “Eyes on the Prize,” from other documentaries

---

Page 6

like “We Shall Overcome,” from movies like ‘The Long Walk Home” and “Glory” and even the awful “Mississippi Burning,” from television mini-series like “Separate But Equal.”

A few years ago, the popular culture discovered the civil rights movement, as it had earlier discovered the war in Vietnam. Both have by now become profitable nostalgia franchises, enriching their exploiters while impoverishing our history. The lessons we are taught–in superficial treatments of the struggle for human rights–is that a war was fought against racism by noble white Americans and the good guys finally won. Just as today the music of the 1960s sells raisins, the myths of the sixties sell movie tickets.

Over the last few years, nearly thirty movies and television shows have focused on the sixties movement. Their heroes and heroines are Klan wives, FBI agents, Northern summer student volunteers, white Southern college coeds and Northern campus-bound radicals, nearly everyone except the black men and women who lived and died in freedom’s cause. These shallow treatments of America’s finest hour are a reflection not of the movement but of their makers’ world, a world where only white men control the process of production and ensure their product perpetuates the supremacy of white America. In these productions, whites fight and win the war–blacks are empty shadows barely seen.

Now two other movies introduce new audiences to two mythic figures from our past. Oliver Stone’s movie “JFK” and Spike Lee’s “Malcolm X” will teach Americans–especially young Americans–more about these two icons of the sixties than a thousand biographies or a thousand history books. Both Stone and Lee are master publicists. Both know there is an unsatisfied hunger for examination of the sixties era. Another movie planned on Martin Luther King will focus on an interracial romance from his university years; this failed romance, the movie will argue, was the fuel for his dedication to equal justice.

There are some exceptions–veterans of the early 1960s voting drive in Mississippi have contracted with a Hollywood producer to create a movie based on their experiences, and they have veto power over script and theme written into their agreement. In “The Long Walk Home,” Hollywood successfully captured the private conflicts behind the highly publicized Montgomery Bus Boycott. Former SNCC worker Endesha Mae Holland (now Dr. Holland of the State University of New York) has written a play, From the Mississippi Delta, based on her life in the movement.

As Todd Gitlin has written, the 1960s were Years of Hope, Days of Rage. They were also years of intense and passionate involvement in causes their participants knew

---

Page 7

were just and right. Most of these productions miss that. They miss both the justice of the cause and the evil and breadth of the opposition. With few exceptions, the movement on film is seen as aberrational behavior, triggered by some incident that propels a sleepy black population into action.

Writing about Nelson Mandela, Nadine Gordimer said: “his people have never revered him as a figure of the past, but as the personification of the future.”

The views of heroes past we get are seldom predictive of what our common future might be. Instead, they are rosy, flawed visions of our past. Our heroes are summoned to celebrate a mythic yesterday. We cannot see in them a prescription for tomorrow.

The 1960s decade was a successful mass mobilization against entrenched racism, and later, against imperialism. Racism’s legal standing, in public accommodations and the ballot box, was eradicated rather quickly. But if its legal grip has been broken, its psychological and cultural grip remains strong. Race and racial prejudice remain the greatest determinants of life chances in our society today. They decide our political behavior as well.

But just as the culture carriers have absorbed the movement, so has the rest of the nation. In my lifetime, I have seen a proliferation of “rights” movements which now embrace the majority of the American people. Today, through administrative order, court decision and legislative act, the protected classes extend to nearly all Americans, including men over forty, white ethnics, the aged, short people, the chemically dependent, the left-handed, the obese, and members of all religions. We need to examine how the road to civil rights became so crowded, and what the consequences are.

There is something seriously wrong when the claims of the descendants of property sold in the African slave trade are held equal with the claims of short, chemically dependent, left-handed white men. Retiring federal judge Frank M. Johnson Jr. of Alabama understands this. He told a commencement at Boston University years ago: “Religious differences, race differences, sex differences, age differences and political differences are not the same. It is no mark of intellectual soundness to treat them as if they were. Moreover, if the life of the law has been experience, then the law should be realistic enough to treat certain issues as special; as racism is special in American history. A judiciary that cannot declare that is of little value.”

A culture which cannot declare that is valueless too.

The recent series of elections–from Louisiana and Mississippi to Pennsylvania–have lessons for us all. Ninety-five percent of blacks voting in Philadelphia voted against Richard Thornburgh because he was the man who helped Ronald Reagan and George Bush fight civil rights laws in court and argue against quotas in the court of public opinion. Thousands of white voters in Mississippi and Louisiana voted for fascist candidates because they ran race-baiting campaigns.

There is much in our past and present worth examining and celebrating, in our culture and our politics. There are, in our history, great lessons of success as well as failure. One unexamined area of the sixties past is the break-up of the progressive youth movement, which foundered on the rocks of race. Many of us recall an understanding then that the mission of white progressives was to work and organize against racism in white middle-and working-class constituencies. That effort obviously didn’t get very far; the lack of success stemmed at least in part from lack of commitment.

Today’s excessive victim-blaming stems, in part, from deeply rooted doubts about the premise of equality itself. If that is so, perhaps we need to draw new lines in the dust. Those who want to dispense with equality except as a fond remembrance should declare themselves and stand on their convictions. At least then we will know who stands for what.

In today’s political and cultural formulations, our riotous past has created an uneasy present where Americans believe strange things: that the anti-war movement created disengagement from overseas entanglements, not the war itself; that powerful black militants, not entrenched white racism, created racial preferences; that the women’s movement, not an economy that forced women into work, threatened the traditionalist family; that pushy women and aggressive blacks pushed America into decline.

These are the lessons too many Americans have learned from our past or absorbed from the culture. We’ve forgotten that the movement created culture too. The Free Southern Theater brought Godot to Greenwood and put Purlie in a real cotton field. The Mississippi Freedom Summer schools found poetry in black school children. The movement’s music now inspires everywhere from the dismantled Berlin Wall to Tiananmen Square. And the movement’s vision resounds everywhere.

We examine ourselves more today than I remember our doing in the past. We deconstruct texts and lives, looking in the entrails of the movement for some connection to the present, but except for imitations of life, we find few.

There is a challenge–for scholars, students, for the ordinary women and men who made the movement then and who make it now–to hold on to and uplift the lessons of the past. Our task is to see that the best of our people and their culture–not the worst–is preserved, celebrated, imitated and expanded now and in the future.

Julian Bond, formerly of Georgia, now writes, lectures and teaches from his home base at American University in Washington, D.C.

Race

Reviewed by Julian Bond

Vol. 14, No. 3, 1992, pp. 26-27

Two Nations: Black and White, Separate, Hostile, Unequal , by Andrew Hacker (Charles Scribners’ Sons, New York, 1992, xiii, 257 pages)Race: How Blacks and Whites Think and Feel About the American Obsession, by Studs Terkel (The New Press, New York, 1992, x, 403 pages)

The publication of these complementary books on race in the months before Los Angeles and several other cities exploded in a sad repetition of the urban riots of the 1960s gives them special timeliness. They repudiate a series of recent tracts which also argue that race is too much with us. These earlier authors—neo-conservative black academics, neo-liberal journalist—-argue generally for benign neglect of problems associated with race, or for market solutions to the deliberate underdevelopment of human capital. Terkel and Hacker argue convincingly we haven’t paid attention enough.

Studs Terkel is the well-known Chicago radio personality who has written several other highly praised oral histories focused on American subjects. His ability to listen while his subjects talk and reveal themselves and his affinity for working class voices seldom heard in discussions of the past or present make him a delight to read.

Andrew Hacker is an academic who brings a scholar’s eye and an impassioned liberal’s anger to his view of what Terkel describes as “The American obsession.” His book is a worthy successor to Myrdal’s 1944 An American Dilemma, although Hacker’s prognosis is harder, taken together they offer invaluable insights into what Americans mean and think when they see race. Although Terkel draws on earlier interviews he’s conducted for other books, and Hacker gives background to present-day reality, these aren’t histories: these are books about Americans today.

Southerners reading Terkel will appreciate how many of his Chicagoans are migrants from the South, and his conversations with three residents of Durham, North Carolina—C. P. Ellis, a former Klansman; Ann Atwater, a black woman who helped Ellis overcome his racism; and Howard Clement, black Republican city council member now more conservative than the former Kleagle—demonstrate both the complexity of American racial attitudes and the difficulty of assigning political positions to individuals based on preconceived notions of who they should be. Other Southerners—C.T. Vivian, Will Campbell, Charlise Lyles—speak here too.

While many of Terkel’s talkers are poignant and hopeful, there is an aura of sadness about both books, especially so in the aftermath of the breakdown of law and order in Simi Valley and the poverty-stricken discourse and repetitious debate that followed. Hacker

---

Page 27

quotes Benjamin Disraeli to describe America’s enduring racial divide: “two nations, between whom there is no intercourse and no sympathy; who are as ignorant of each other’s habits, thought, and feelings, as if they were dwellers in different zones, or inhabitants of different planets.”

Hacker’s Two Nations is a description of a frightening condition without prescription for its cure; so is Terkel’s Race. Hacker marshals facts and surveys to prove what many readers will already know; Terkel’s subjects add a human face to Hacker’s statistics, and prove Disraeli wrong, for many of Terkel’s talkers live or work in an interracial—if imperfect—world. Although presented in very different forms, it is only this which sets one book apart from the other. Hacker’s numbers represent stark racial divisions. Terkel’s voices, both blacks and whites, in their sharing with us seem less stark.

Race serves important functions for many Americans. It defines class standing, differentiates between “us” and “them”, wins elections, and creates profits.

The Rodney King riots created an explosion in race-talk and analysis, most of it designed to return the discussion of racial division to the Social Darwinism of the early twentieth century, to culture rather than color. But the backward turn of the debate on race didn’t begin in Los Angeles; it has been oozing back into the discourse for several years. If blame for black joblessness, crime, teenage pregnancy, and family break-up can be assigned to a lack of underclass values instead of racial bias, to poverty of the spirit instead of the gross upward redistribution of income which occurred during the Reagan years, or to welfare state-bred laziness instead of the transformation of the American economy from an highly-paid industrial to a minimum wage service base, if all this can be believed then the problems of the ghetto can only be solved by ghetto residents themselves, thus absolving government and excusing non-ghetto citizens of any responsibility: when ghetto residents heal themselves, they’ll be welcomed into the national polity.

These books demonstrate again and again how bankrupt and bogus our national dialogue is. Terkel’s people aren’t interviewed on talk shows. They don’t write op-ed pieces. Their opinions aren’t solicited by pundits. Policymakers want their votes, not their views. But many of them in their unobserved daily lives are making a larger contribution to healing the racial divide than do most of those in official position.

Hacker’s charts and graphs make poor television, and his expositions require more than a quick sound bite. We’ve been taught not to listen to any argument that takes longer than fifteen seconds to hear or five minutes to read. These books argue against racial sloganeering.

Terkel arranges his interviews in topics, such as “Friends” or “Welfare,” creating a context in which his subjects—blacks and whites—talk about race. They are interrupted by “Overviews”—a larger portrait—from a journalist or academic.

Hacker’s chapters also divide his discussion into familiar subjects. Anyone looking for statistical underpinning for arguments about what race means and what it does to us will find his book the more useful of the two. Some of his tables sadly refute the notion that some things, once perfect, are getting worse; they suggest instead they’ve always been awful and are worse today only by degree. The numbers of female-headed households have been three times greater among blacks than whites for forty years. Black unemployment rates were 2.08 times those for whites in 1960; in 1990, they were 2.76 times as high.

But everyone concerned about our national obsession should read both these books. Hacker may occasionally depress readers, and Terkel may uplift them, but both make a common sense contribution to the on-going dialogue on race.

Julian Bond, currently lives in Washington, D. C, and teaches at the University of Virginia.

History, Hope and Heroes

By Julian Bond

Vol. 15, No. 4, 1993, pp. 1-7

In 1993, the grandson of an American slave teaches at the university slave owner Thomas Jefferson founded in Virginia, and teaches young Americans about the modern day struggle for human liberty. That struggle has its roots in Jefferson’s words more than his deeds and its parallels in my grandfather, James Bond’s, membership in a transcendent generation—that body of black women and men born in the nineteenth century in servitude, freed by the Civil War, determined to make their way as free women and men.

My students are modern young men and women, filled with the cynicism and despair of their age. For them, these are the worst of times, and my documentation of a harsher and more oppressive past does not always convince them that these days are better times than those older days they study with me.

Today’s world holds few heroes for my students, and this lack of heroes, coupled with their pessimism, makes them unlikely candidates to create a movement of their own.

My students learn about a more modern generation of Americans than my grandfather’s. The transcendent generation they study, born in segregation in the twentieth century, was freed from racism’s legal restraints by its member’s own efforts, determined to make their way in freedom.

The historian’s task is to remind the students—to remind ourselves—that King was more than the movement and that the movement was more than Martin Luther King. Through demonstrating the democratic nature of the movement, we not only discover and

---

Page 2

expose heroism unknown, we demonstrate the optimism and sense of possibility which was the movement’s engine. By giving voice to the hopefulness of earlier generations who faced resistance and oppression my students have never known, and will never know, we make heroism more available, more attainable.

I want my students to learn history, heroes, and hope.

Preserving and interpreting the civil rights past requires acknowledgement that the movement was made by many, not the few, and the avoidance of the King-deification and dependence which has so permeated the historical discourse.

One hundred and thirty years ago President Abraham Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation. Because my grandfather was born in Kentucky, he remained a slave until the 13th Amendment became law in 1865.

Fifty years ago the world was at war, and Roosevelt, Stalin and Churchill met in Teheran.

Back in the United States, between May and August of 1943, race riots swept through American cities, resulting in forty deaths.

1993 also marks the thirtieth anniversary of the civil rights movement’s notable March on Washington where Martin Luther King delivered his best-remembered speech, in which he asked Americans to share his dream.

These anniversaries provide a handy platform from which retrospectives can be launched, and a proper distance from which to look back upon an event with suitable detachment.

In our glorification of the past, we often bemoan the present day reality. From the present we look backward and see the modern civil rights movement as heroic, with King in the leading role. I want to discuss King as hero, first in the larger context, and specifically in his role in Birmingham, Alabama thirty years ago. By regarding King and the civil rights movement as heroic, we miss the reality of each. Each becomes more—and less—than they actually were, robbing today’s lesser mortals of any ability to duplicate their heroism today.

Too, our heroes have changed as technology has changed our expectations, and that technology has expanded the lists from which heroes can be chosen—today they come more frequently from weekly combat on

---

Page 3

the playing field than from the battleground.

The oral tradition that once transmitted heroic words from generation to generation has been replaced by the VCR. Today we can fast-forward through a modern hero’s life to get to the good parts. Once we were inspired by the telling; today we are entertained by the viewing.

Buckskin-clad backwoodsmen and powder-wigged Founding Fathers have been replaced by the Italian-suited Wall Streeter and the head-shaved sports star. That athlete transcends racial boundaries; today, so does Martin Luther King.

This marvelous man who was my college teacher speaks in death and memory to whites and blacks as he never did in life.

In grainy film taken at his 1963 March on Washington speech, we hear again the measured, rhythmic cadence, we see the commanding presence, we hear the booming voice, we share the martyr’s dream.

We honor him because of what he means to our imperfect and selective memories—the stoic who faced injury and death, and the major figure of his period, the spokesman for nonviolence, able to articulate for whites what blacks wanted and for blacks what would be required if freedom was to be the prize.

But that King is half the man. The King we see is a blurred picture of who the man was.

The reappraisals of King, his leadership, the movement he helped to make, and most recently his character have taken a familiar path.

Thirty years ago he emerged triumphant from Birmingham. He had skillfully employed youthful demonstrators whose buoyancy and vitality provoked the anticipated and nationally-televised violence from the local police. He had drawn an unwilling President into his drama; the President’s men helped make a settlement possible.

A few months later his dramatic speech at the March on Washington cemented his place as first among equals in America’s civil rights leadership. Like the beatings and hosings in Birmingham, King’s Washington speech was televised; in a nation-wide mass meeting, an American audience was treated for the first time to the unedited oratory of America’s principal preacher, and for the first time, a mass white audience heard the undeniable justice of black demands. By 1965 King was at the apex of black leadership; his success in Selma at soliciting national revulsion at racist violence translated into federal action and marked him as the primary figure in America in the leadership of what was being called the Negro revolution. With King as leader, the organized movement would remain peaceful, and the movement’s goals would remain inclusive into the American mainstream, but other events and personalities would begin to intrude.

In December, 1964, King was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize; within a few months he demonstrated he took the Prize seriously, speaking out against the War in Vietnam.

King’s conscience could not avoid involving him against the war, and his anti-war activities gave him a chance to further define himself.

“I’m much more than a civil rights leader,” he said in mid-1965, while insisting his major focus would continue to be the struggle against black oppression.

He took a campaign against discrimination and black poverty to Chicago in 1965 and 1966, but Chicago’s rigid politics suffocated the movement he tried to build. He still peppered his speeches with darts against the war and spoke more forcefully against what he called America’s “vicious class system(s).”

“If our economic system is to survive,” he told his Atlanta congregation, “there must be a better distribution of wealth… We can’t have a system where some people live in superfluous, inordinate wealth while others live in abject, deadening poverty.”1In the middle of King’s Chicago campaign, James Meredith was shot on his one-man march through Mississippi. King and others took up the March. In a dusty cotton field Stokeley Carmichael shouted “Black Power,” and the rift between King’s moderation and the militancy of other movement figures became public. Black power did more than frighten whites and black moderates; it divided support for the move-

---

Page 4

ment and gave sanction to those who thought American blacks already had won enough.

Acceptable pluralism became unacceptable separatism when the proponents’ skins were black; pride became arrogance when nonviolent petitioner became militant demander.

King’s last years were marked by attitudinal changes—in black America’s demands and white Americans’ response. In Montgomery in 1955 blacks had asked for seats at an abundant table; they could gain and no one—except the believers in white supremacy—had to lose. As the movement grew in strength and extended beyond the borders of the Old Confederacy, many whites began to believe blacks wanted the whole table for themselves.

King interrupted preparations for a Poor People’s March on Washington to help striking garbage workers in Memphis; it was there he was murdered in 1968.

The violence he had fought against in life, and had exploited so brilliantly to win sympathy for civil rights in the South, exploded across America in the aftermath of his murder.

Eighteen years later, President Ronald Reagan reluctantly signed the law that made King’s birthdate a national holiday, and today schoolchildren across America know part of the story of Martin Luther King. His heroic status was assured.

The story schoolchildren do not know is what makes making heroes the peculiar and ironic process that it is. They do not know that in Martin Luther King’s America what had been “a culture with a racist ideology,” became “a chronically racist culture” after Emancipation, unifying all who found themselves “within the Caucasian chalk circle,” offering reward and punishment based on pigmentation in King’s time and today.2

The movement King helped to lead destroyed the moral authority undergirding that culture; that is why we honor him. We do not honor the severe critic of capitalism and its excesses. We do not honor the pacifist who preached that all wars were evil, who said a nation which chose guns over butter would starve its people and kill itself. We do not honor the man who linked apartheid in South African and South Alabama. We honor an antiseptic hero.

He could not have imagined his birthday would be a national holiday or that American schoolchildren of all races would spend the days surrounding January 15 each year declaiming his March on Washington speech, learning about Rosa Parks and the boycott in Montgomery.

And he could not have imagined that he would be considered by many to be a hero, for if he realized he was worshiped in his lifetime, he thought that worship vainglorious and misplaced. He knew his human failings.

Because his opinions remain controversial today, we selectively honor only part of the whole man; even the most vigorous opponents of civil rights can find a King quote to camouflage their racism. They often chose excerpts from the “I Have A Dream” speech given thirty years ago.

1993 marks also the thirtieth anniversary year of “Project C” for ‘confrontation,’ the plan created by the Rev. Wyatt Tee Walker to bring creative tension to Alabama’s largest city. I first knew Birmingham as a student from Atlanta; it was a place where you did not linger after football games between Atlanta’s Booker T. Washington High School and Birmingham’s Parker High School, particularly if Parker lost. I knew the city later, from the perspective of a participant in the modern civil rights movement, as “Bombingham” because of the frequency of its explosive attacks on blacks. It became known throughout the nation and the world in 1963 as the site of a ferocious fight between the movement’s nonviolent forces and the white resistance, and it was here thirty years ago that a bloody bomb ended the lives of four young girls. In Birmingham’s streets a drama unfolded that typifies the entire civil rights movement for many: nonviolent protestors, many of them pre-school children, singing while they marched from the Sixteenth Street

---

Page 5

Baptist Church into blasts of water fired from cannons whose power, it was said, could strip bark from trees and bricks from buildings.

Looking backward from today at the events which happened here, we can see the Birmingham of 1963 through others’ eyes. Historians and movement leaders alike have much to tell us about what was done and what it meant—to them then and to us today.

Taylor Branch and David Garrow, in their Pulitzer Prize winning studies3 of Martin Luther King, have given us moving portraits of the man and the movement he helped to make, in Birmingham and elsewhere. For Garrow, Birmingham was where “SCLC had succeeded in bringing the civil rights struggle into the forefront of the national consciousness.”4

For some in the civil rights movement, Birmingham was observed through the parochial prisms of organizational interests, through the lens of competition with King and SCLC for national sympathy and contributions, for the loyalty of black America, and for the attention of the White House.

Despite the descriptions of prize-winning historians and authors, and despite some criticism and carping from the civil rights movement’s more prominent participants, there is much more to be learned about what happened in the Magic City in the Spring of 1963. The popular view of the Birmingham movement—children facing fire hoses and the leadership of Martin Luther King—obscures a larger level of participation and involvement that explains the democratic nature of the Southern struggle for human rights.

A visitor today may be surprised to learn that Birmingham is eager to exploit its civil rights past. The city is home today to a new Civil Rights Institute, opened in 1992. It is a wonderful structure, built with taxpayers’ money, a remarkable fact in view of the outbreak of protests in Birmingham a mere thirty years ago. A visitor to the Institute can learn much about what took place in the surrounding streets three decades ago, particularly why the movement was called a mass movement. Here visitors have a chance to learn much about heroes and heroism.

In a ledger the Institute has used as a visitors’ book on and since its opening days are written the accounts of movement participants. Those who signed were asked to record what they did—whether they marched, were arrested, or served in some capacity or capacities, many having performed more than one activity.5

On the ledger’s first page are found thirty-six names of those who marched in 1963’s demonstrations, three who served as security guards, seven who said they were arrested and six who said they were jailed, two who served as committee members, two who served meals, and ten who worked to register voters. The pages which follow list many more.

The visitors’ ledger is the basis for the Civil Rights Institute’s planned oral history project. Its sign-up sheets are also the Birmingham movement’s social register, a roster of who was who and who did what, a roll call of the movement’s nameless and forgotten.

---

Page 6

In a few words, testimonies of cramped shorthand, the episodes they chose to record compose their Birmingham movement.

Empress Akweke-king, now of Brooklyn wrote: “dog attacked.”

Rev. BW. Henderson of Avenue O reports “house bombed on Sugar Hill.” Ruth Barefield-Pendleton of 2nd Street West “marched Selma to Montgomery.” Doris Brewster of Riverchase Parkway simply wrote “hosed.”

Rodrick Hilson “brought kids from Bessemer to Birmingham.”

In Arthur Lee Smith’s account he “acted as liaison between jail and headquarters (church).”

Willie James Coleman boasts he was “first to go to jail for park.” Sandra Johnson’s brief narrative says simply “left school.” Glenda Bailey of Adamsville remembers “heard blast at church from the fountain Heights Methodist Church.”

Thirteen-year-old Virgil Ware could not sign in for himself; he was killed on the afternoon of September 15, 1963, in the angry aftermath of the dynamite blast Glenda Bailey heard. Riding on the handlebars of his brother’s bicycle, he was shot by a sixteen-year-old white boy riding on the back of a motor scooter. Someone signing in for Virgil Ware wrote: “Deceased. KKK killed him same day 16th Street Baptist was bombed.”

Charlotte Billups Jernigan modestly described her father, the Rev. Charles Billups as, “Foot soldier, dedicated worker, 1927-1968.” Historians of the Birmingham movement will remember that while Rev. Billups was a dedicated worker, he was far more than a foot soldier; he was at least a Major General.

Flora Smith of Bessemer was “chaplain in jail.”

Not all who made the movement were black. Melva Jimerson, now of Washington, D.C., was “part of Alabama Council on Human Relations.” Randall Jimerson, now of East Hampton, Connecticut, “spoke out on civil rights issues with white students in Homewood.”

Many are modest. From Stafford, Vermont, William Sloane Coffin described himself simply as “Freedom Rider.”

Will Eatman of Birmingham remembered, “I was water down on 5th Avenue 17th Street.”

After twenty-five pages, each page with forty-one lines, each line defining a small space, each space filled with proud self-identifications of contributions made to breaking Alabama’s rigid walls, of days in jail, of dogs and hoses, of marches and mass meetings, and explosions heard, of offices sought and sons killed in war, of ushers and musicians and food servers, of explosions

---

Page 7

heard, Steve Norris is the first to mention the man most Americans associate with Birmingham then and now.

Norris writes: “In jail with Martin Luther King.”

“In jail with Martin Luther King!”

Here Steven Norris lists what must have been for him the significant moment of his involvement in the Birmingham campaign. His fellow authors had summed up their magic moments in other ways; they are the primary actors, only occasionally the acted upon. It is they who “march” or “brought kids” or “were first” to go to jail or were “water down;” they were attacked by dogs or hosed by firemen or simply “spoke out” where speaking out was dangerous.

These pages, filled with the self description and identification of movement makers from Birmingham and Alabama thirty years ago—provides excellent opportunity for historians to examine the Birmingham movement anew, from the heart of the movement’s mass.

Let no one tell us their movement did not succeed.

Ask Hartman Turnbow, a black Mississippian, who said:

“Anybody hadda told me ‘fore it happened that conditions would make this much change between the white and the black in Holmes County here where I live, why I’da just said, ‘You’re lyin’. It won’t happen.’

“I just wouldn’t have believed it. I didn’t dream of it. I didn’t see no way. But it got to workin’ just like the citizenship class teacher told us—that if we would register to vote and just stick with it. He says it’s goin’ be some difficulties. He told us that when we started. We was lookin’ for it. He said we gon’ have difficulties, gon’ have troubles, folks gon’ lose their homes, folks gon’ lose their lives, peoples gon’ lose all their money, and just like he said, all of that happened. He didn’t miss it. He hit it kadap on the head, and it’s workin’ now. It won’t never go back to where it was!”6

It succeeded in spite of Turnbow’s “difficulties,” in spite of what King called the brutality of a dying order shrieking across the land.

In its successes, it has much to teach us now.

Today, from Somalia and Haiti, the United States looks back at Vietnam to discover what went wrong. We can look back at yesterday’s civil rights movement to discover what went right.

Yesterday’s movement succeeded because victims became their own best champions. When Mrs. Rosa Parks refused to stand up, and when King stood up to preach, mass participation came to the movement for civil rights.

Today, too many of my students and too many others—young and old, black and white—believe they are impotent, unable to influence the society in which they live.

Three decades ago, a mass movement marched, picketed, protested and organized and brought state sanctioned segregation to it knees.

One movement message is that people move forward fastest when they move forward together. Another lesson is that heroes need more than a passive audience if their heroism is to flourish. That audience can provide a context for heroism, a supportive cast for heroic deeds and a mirror for its valor.

Black Americans worked their way to civil rights through the difficult business of organizing. Registering voters, one by one. Organizing a community, block by block. Creating a movement in which one hundred parts made up the successful whole.

The civil rights movement provides more than a century’s history of aggressive self-help and voluntarism in church and civic clubs, assisting the needy and financing the cause of social justice, and an equally long and honorable tradition of struggle and resistance.

Our task is to communicate the hopefulness that made the movement possible, the optimism that conferred heroism on a population history does not acknowledge. “Greater efforts and grander victories,” my grandfather would say.

That was his generation’s promise a century ago, an inheritance from the generation born as slaves. That is the modern movement’s promise to us now.

NOTES:

Julian Bond is Distinguished Adjunct Professor in the School of Government at American University in Washington, D. C., and a Lecturer in History at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville, Virginia. He wishes to acknowledge Vincent Harding’s text Hope and History for the (un)conscious inspiration for the title of this article.

Remembering Another Atlanta: Gate City

By Julian Bond

Vol. 18, No. 2, 1996 pp. 22-24

“South–that part of the United States south of Mason’s and Dixon’s line, the Ohio River, and the southern boundaries of Missouri and Kansas.” (Webster’s New Collegiate Dictionary, Second Edition, G. & C. Merriam Co., 1956).

My forty-year-old dictionary gives this equally ancient definition–stark and geographical, it barely describes the South, its cultures and peoples, its peculiarities, the distinctions that made it different from the rest of the nation.

Over time, this distinctiveness has given way to the sameness that afflicts all of America–similar fast foods sold everywhere, dialects and accents disappearing, once-regional musics now enjoyed by all, and the history of racial oppression no longer a territorial taint.

But the South I returned to almost forty years ago, as a college freshman in 1957, had much to commend it. My family had lived for the first five years of my life in rural Georgia on a college campus where my father was president; as a child of the leading figure in that small world, I harbor pleasant childhood memories–a supportive cast of students, college professors and townspeople, lush orchards of juicy peaches, bright cotton fields and warm sunshine.

Now, after twelve years north of Mason’s and Dixon’s line, we were coming back.

The South we came back to had its attractions, and I was old enough to appreciate them. It was warmer than the North I left behind, and the people seemed warmer, too–their accents, white and black, were soft and pleasant, unlike the clipped speech of rural Pennsylvania; their words more welcoming because of their slowness; their smiles more eagerly produced and, seemingly, more sincerely meant.

My grade and high school years had been spent in rural Pennsylvania, and my new classmates at Morehouse College were quick to spot my Northernness–my non-Southernness.

---

Page 23

My speech and clothing were giveaways. Coca-Cola was “pop” to them; movies were the “show.” Policemen were “po-licemen.”

No one wore the “highwater” trousers that I did.

They also quickly spotted my unfamiliarity with what made the South utterly different then from the rest of America, if you were black. They knew the racial etiquette that governed relations between the races, and while never yielding to it, felt more comfortable than I did navigating downtown Atlanta.

That whites held absolute power over Southern blacks was a given to them. It had only been a distant truth to me. That any white person could strike or kill a black person without fear of retribution became gospel in Atlanta, more real than the distant preachments of black newspapers that had come into my Pennsylvania home. Once we relocated to Atlanta, the far-away horrors they reported took on substance and encouraged me to spinelessly leave the ordinary task of buying a suit for college to my mother–surely not even the worst Klansman would dare molest her, and her cowardly son could remain at home, safe from harm.

Atlanta was then short years away from declaring itself the “City Too Busy To Hate,” its Babbitt-like explanation for the absence of violent racial conflict over the integration of a handful of black children into formerly all-white schools. It was too busy making money. It had long considered itself exceptional among Southern towns–the South had few real cities then. With Birmingham as a brutally severe example of what Atlanta was not, the city’s business community touted its airport, its many regional offices of national firms, and its benign race relations as reasons why Atlanta was different, the city never too busy to hype.

And it was.

At home, on the Morehouse College campus, and in the business blocks that boasted more wealthy black individuals than any other city, I was surrounded by women and men who gave the lie to my skewed picture of the South.

On Hunter Street–renamed Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard today–and on Auburn Avenue, black businesses abounded. A bank, insurance companies, a savings and loan, real estate companies, the country’s only daily black newspaper and only black-owned radio station, gas stations–these and other, more usual enterprises made Atlanta Booker T. Washington’s dream writ large.

(That a black man owning a gas station was remarkable demonstrates how sharply race limited black opportunity and made the smallest, most ordinary accomplishment a triumph for the whole race.)

Atlanta’s sizeable black middle class–public school teachers and administrators, professors and administrators from the four black colleges, its graduate school and collection of theological schools, doctors, dentists and lawyers, even the nation’s first black Certified Public Accountant–made Atlanta special.

Most lived on the sprawling West Side. Unlike northern ghettoes, however gilded, where blacks inherited homes whites had abandoned, many of Atlanta’s middle-class blacks lived in homes built by black contractors with black labor, sold by black realtors. And what homes!

Our out-of-town visitors in the late fifties didn’t want to see downtown and couldn’t see the present-day city’s most visited site, the Martin Luther King Center For Nonviolent Social Change; in the late 1950s, King still pastored Montgomery’s Dexter Avenue Baptist Church. In the late fifties and early sixties, these visitors wanted to see the black homes on the West Side, with their swimming pools and multi-car garages.

Black Atlanta was a self-contained world. Unable to join white professional groups like the Atlanta Bar Association, blacks named their organizations the Gate City Teachers Association or Gate City Bar Association. If you lived in “The Gate City,” you could travel through life from birth to death without having to see anyone who lived in “Atlanta.”

Gate City could be wonderful. It had joys that made it a college student’s delight. Sweet Auburn Avenue’s nightclubs–the Auburn Avenue Casino, the Royal Peacock–presented the best in entertainment. Restaurants like Frazier’s Cafe Society and Paschal’s served the best in food.

Gate City was what sociologist Aldon Morris calls a “protest community.” It was dotted with organizations and institutions that kept alive a tradition of challenge and resistance. Walking down Auburn Avenue or Hunter Street, you could see the man or woman who had mounted

---

Page 24

a fight against racial restrictions. It had living, breathing heroes and heroines.

From this environment Atlanta’s sit-in movement was born in 1960; Lonnie King, Jr., and Joseph Pierce, fellow students at Morehouse College, approached me in early February at an off-campus hangout, Yates and Milton’s Drug Store, to suggest we imitate a sit-in protest four North Carolina A T students had begun in Greensboro a few days before. With a how-to description of the Greensboro sit-ins printed in the Atlanta Daily World as our guide, we organized students from Clark, Morris Brown, and Spelman colleges, Atlanta University and the Interdenominational Theological Seminary, and by mid-March launched sit-ins at segregated downtown restaurants.

We knew we had borrowed inspiration and organization from the Greensboro sit-ins, but had little notion that we were building on a foundation others in Gate City had established before us. I knew my grandfather, James Bond, had been arrested in Atlanta in the early 1900s for “moving onto a white street,” but, like my comrades, had little knowledge of Gate City’s rich history of protest and rebellion that predated our 1960s action.

Daily college assemblies brought us the major black figures of the clay. We were introduced early on to the larger, current world outside the campus, but had little knowledge of the rich tradition on which we would build.

We did not know that the Atlanta NAACP, inspired by Morehouse College’s first lady, Eugenia Burns Hope, had established six-week citizenship classes to teach potential voters in 1933. We did not know that young Rev. Martin Luther King Sr. had led a 1935 march on City Hall to demand voting rights. We did know that our college campus was surrounded by slums, and those crowded projects and sloping shacks were nesting places for crimes and despair. But that world was alien to most of us then, as it is foreign to too many Atlantans today.

Our efforts were supported by many of the elders who had paved our way; by the middle 1960s, spurred by the 1964 Civil Rights Act, Atlanta had become an “open city.” Racial barriers fell, and the black electorate that had moderated the city’s earlier politics became supreme.

Yesterday’s Atlanta–a mean milieu, tainted by white supremacy, rife with unfairness and inequality despite neonationalist utopian fantasies that recall a united, nurturing community–hopefully can never exist again.

Atlanta today is both product and prisoner of its past. In Race and The Shaping of Twentieth Century Atlanta, Georgia Tech history professor Ronald H. Bayor explains in detail how race shaped the city’s physical development from the Civil War through the 1980s.1

His sober study is a warning to today’s visitors, who, dazzled by skyscrapers and stadiums celebrating a succession of black mayors and enumerating the wealth of the city’s sepia millionaires, cannot see the serious problems these monuments obscure.

He writes about the history of race relations in America’s cities and its effect on Atlanta:

This legacy remains very evident in present day Atlanta. Politics, the school system, neighborhood development, highways and roads, traffic patterns, public housing placement, city service delivery and amenities, the transportation network, and employment still show signs of its impact. Racial issues, now increasingly combined with class factors, still strongly influence policy. One recent example is the dispute arising out of Olympic site development in neighborhoods that were urban renewal victims decades earlier. The mistrust of city government generated years ago has carried into present discussion of housing removal and resident relocation, even though city officials are now black.2

Gate City and Atlanta are still two different places. Atlanta has the largest percentage of poor people living in public housing of any American city except Newark, New Jersey. In spite of the electoral accomplishments of some and the enrichment of a few, most black Atlantans remain untouched by the latest in a series of New Souths.

Gate City is still barely there. Walk down Auburn Avenue. Drive out to Collier Heights. Stroll across the Morehouse Campus. Read the World or the Inquirer or the Voice. Eat at Paschal’s.

Today’s visitor ought to remember this past, while rejecting any attempt at resurrecting yesterday’s mythic organic community, where everyone had–and knew–their place. That Gate City is better left in memory. No fond nostalgia for simpler and better worlds calls for its rebirth.

Gate City and Atlanta remind us not of what we’ve lost–a wholly imagined and false romantic remembrance of a world where family values triumphed in a classless community upon which whites never intruded. That world never was. It cannot–should not–be renewed.

Instead, they remind us of how false the victories we thought we had won really were, of how little we may have actually gained.

Julian Bond is a Distinguished Professor In Residence at American University and a History Professor at the University of Virginia. He lived in Atlanta from 1957 to 1987.

Democracy Demands Memory

By Julian Bond

Vol. 19, No. 1, 1997 pp. 3-4

“I tell my children today they don’t know anything. You know, when I hear young folk talking about what they ain’t gonna take, and I like to sit down and tell ’em, ‘You haven’t seen anything. You just don’t know what it’s all about. I don’t know what it is you can’t take.’ And when I go back telling them some of my history, you know, they perk up their ears.”

Mary Sanford, a tenants rights and housing activist in Atlanta, Georgia, in 1992

Mary Sanford’s words and the reminiscences of other Southerners, black and white, about the civil rights movement ought to be required listening, because few Americans have heard them.

You can hear them in Will The Circle Be Unbroken?–a landmark radio documentary on the civil rights movement. The radio programs tell the story of how Sanford and hundreds of other people in five southern communities watched, made–and sometimes tried to stop–one of America’s most powerful social movements.

Ordinary Americans who witnessed and participated in the movement explain what we Americans have done so far in closing the racial divide; they explain what else needs to be accomplished.

They help explain why we still argue over whether racial minorities ought to be elected to public office; whether merit was ever really the test for getting a job or a seat in a university freshman class; whether children should be bused to schools.

For much of the twentieth century, an interracial

---

Page 4

black-led movement fought against white supremacy. That after nearly one-hundred years the job remains undone is not a testimony to the movement’s failure; it is a measure of how great the odds were, and how difficult the task is that remains.

Mis-memory of this movement threatens to erase the reality of the often brutal past, the class divisions evident in every institution from church to school, the failure of civic institutions to service black communities, and most of all the cruelty and harshness of American apartheid.

A survey of racial attitudes by the seventy-eight-year-old Southern Regional Council demonstrates that while Americans do not place reducing racial inequality high on their list of priorities. few Americans really believe they live in a color-blind society.

One-third of the public has no idea what “affirmative action” is, and makes no connection at all between those two words and race and gender. But, a majority think qualified minority and female applicants deserve it. Three out of four believe our elected officials ought to reflect the diversity of the electorate, and if eliminating majority black districts causes a decrease in black representation, a majority favors drawing such districts 58 to 29 percent.

The more poll respondents knew about our history, and the more the likely results of ending race-specific remedies to discrimination were explained to them, the more likely they were to respond thoughtfully, rather than with bumper-sticker answers.

In more and more schools, students learn about the democratic civil rights movement of the recent past. They learn that ordinary women and men were moved to extraordinary acts of courage. They learn that Ozell Sutton (now with the Justice Department) risked his job as a journalist when he challenged a newspaper’s policy that discriminated against black women. They learn that when Rosa Parks refused to stand up on a bus in Montgomery and when Martin Luther King, Jr., stood up to preach, mass participation came to the movement for civil rights. They learn that most presidents had to be forced, by public pressure built by the movement, to make the weakest gesture toward insuring freedom for all citizens.

And they learn that what was done once may well be done again.

At the end of Will The Circle Be Unbroken?, former Arkansas governor Sid McMath says:

“I think you’ve got a need for continuing a civil rights movement, that’s not just the blacks. Of course the civil rights movement wasn’t restricted to blacks. There were a lot of good white people in there. And you need a civil rights movement for everybody. Women need a continuing civil rights movement and the blacks and the Mexicans. They should all join together in the civil rights movement to see that the rights we have are protected and that the laws we have on the books are implemented and that the Bill of Rights is recognized in spirit as well as in the letter of the law. So there’s a continued need for the civil rights movement. Civil rights education. Human rights.”

Julian Bond is a professor at American University in Washington, DC and the University of Virginia. Since he was a college student leading sit-in demonstrations in Atlanta in 1960, he has been an active participant in the movements for civil rights, economic justice and peace, and an aggressive spokesman for the disinherited.

The Masters of Augusta

By Julian Bond

Vol. 24, No. 3-4, 2002 p. 5

Discrimination takes many forms. It may not always be illegal, but it is always wrong.

Prejudice based on race or gender is wrong, whether it occurs at a public university, the work place, or an exclusive private golf club. The golfers who play at such clubs and the members who belong to them condone discrimination by their presence.

In the case of Augusta National Golf Club, the corporations who purchase memberships, the sponsors who supported televising the Masters’ Tournament, and the broadcasters now without sponsors–they’ve been “hooted” away–also endorse and sanction discrimination.

Golf has had a troubled history, despite a black man, Dr. George Grant, having created the foundation upon which it rests; he invented and patented the golf tee in 1899. Two black men, Oscar Bunn and John Shippen, qualified for the U. S. Open in 1896 over the objections of some white players. (Shippen finished fifth.)

A black architect. John Bartholomew, designed many courses where he could not play. In reaction to golf’s early whites-only and men-only policies, blacks formed the United Golf Association in 1928–women and whites were welcomed in their tournaments.

In 1943 the Professional Golf Association (PGA) adopted a”Caucasian clause” excluding all non-whites, and exclusion became par for the course. Only recently have blacks been allowed to join exclusive clubs, and then only after threats of nonviolent protests. Thirty years after the enactment of Title IX, giving women equity in college sports, Augusta National Golf Club still refuses to admit women. Notably, while the organization of professional women golfers, the LPGA, has spoken out against Augusta’s policies, the all-male PGA maintains a disgraceful silence, even as the first woman has qualified to play in a PGA event.

Equally silent are Augusta members like Jack Nicklaus and Arnold Palmer. Tiger Woods, while expressing the view that Augusta’s policies are wrong, has resisted efforts to make him withdraw from 2003’s Augusta tournament. Woods has also properly resisted efforts at racially profiling him into a leadership role on this issue.

One can argue whether the fight over admitting already privileged women to an elite private club is worthwhile; alter all, don’t most women face much more pressing and immediate problems?

Of course they do, but intolerance has to be rebuffed wherever it appears. Symbols are important too, and the exclusion of women from Augusta sends the message that women are not the equal of men–in the clubhouse or the boardroom.

Couldn’t the energy expended on this fight be better used elsewhere?

The only energy spent so far is an exchange of letters between the National Council of Women’s Organizations NCWO) and the aptly named “Hootie” Johnson.

The masters of Augusta have much for which to answer. They excluded blacks until public pressure forced change. They still exclude over half of all blacks–women. Public pressure will end this wrong-headed policy, too.

When it does, women and men will have taken an important–if small–step “fore-ward.”

Julian Bond is a Distinguished Professor in Residence at American University and a history professor at the University of Virginia. Since 1998, he has been Board Chairman of the NAACP. Bond served as a member of the board of the Southern Regional Council from 1996 to 1998.