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♪ [Opening Music] ♪
♪ ♪
>> Genessa Jagdeo: Good afternoon my name is
Genessa Jagdeo.
>> Tarik Glenn: I'm Tarik Glenn.
>> Anushka Jegdeo: I'm Anushka Jagdeo.
>> Genessa: First things first.
Please remember to turn off all cell phones and pagers as well
there will be absolutely no flash photography
audio or video recording.
As students of University of North Carolina at Asheville we
would like to welcome the community members to the
University and all of you, faculty,
staff, students and community to this event.
The three of us are executive members of the black student
Association and to all of us as I'm sure it is too many of you
the month of February signifies more than snow and ice.
Indeed it is the month of Black history.
>> Glenn: Some of the events that will be taking place this
month include: an exhibition by noted African-American artist
who is in the audience, Terry Davis will be on display
2 to 8 PM today and also tomorrow from 11:30 to 5:30 PM
in UNCA's Laurel Forum.
Joy McKnight will hold a book signing and reception at
7 PM Friday, February 13th in UNCA's Reuter Center.
Noted African-American painter Tarleton Blackwell currently has
paintings on display at the main floor of the Ramsey Library.
And of course our keynote address by Mr. Julian Bond.
BSA is a student-run organization that is devoted to
the uplifting and wellness of black students here on campus.
We plan a variety of events and activities for the campus.
All students are welcome to join our organization.
>> Anushka: As black students at UNCA,
we feel that it is essential for all of you to understand why
Julian Bond is here.
BSA's former President Winston Rose was instrumental in
starting efforts to bring Mr. Bond here because he knows
that as a group we are unsatisfied.
>> Glenn: As UNCA continues it's a struggle to have a diverse
campus, we've made a huge step for bringing
Mr. Julian Bond here.
But, it is only one of many steps that we must take to bring
diversity here on campus.
As a community, we must continue our efforts and realize that
although we've made some progress we still have a long
way to go in reaching our goals.
These goals can be reached with persistence and with
the help of everyone.
>> Genessa: We are told that things will get better in time,
but the time has passed.
And now we must catch up.
We can wait no longer and we need your help.
Every person who is a member of this campus,
let's help in making this university become what it was
meant to be, a true liberal arts institution.
>> Anushka: Dr. Dwight Mullen and Dr. James H. Mullen Junior
are both committed to this goal.
Dr. Dwight Mullen, who will moderate our question and answer
session is the Director of Diversity
and Multicultural Affairs.
Chancellor Mullen is a native of Holyoke Massachusetts.
He earned a Master's Degree in public policy from
Harvard University's John F. Kennedy
School of Government in 1984 and a doctorate in higher
education from the University of Massachusetts Amherst in 1994.
He and his wife Mary Mullen who have been tremendous help today
have two young children Mary Frances and James Charles.
Please welcome Chancellor Mullen.
[applause]
>> Chancellor Mullen: Thank you very much
and good morning.
It is a privilege for me to welcome our Board of Trustees,
our Foundation Board, colleague, faculty and staff,
students most importantly and in the special way our community to
this very important event at the University of North Carolina
at Asheville.
This is your university, a place where significant conversations
can and must occur about the vital issues of our time.
A place were debate and dialogue and discussion give life
to the liberal arts.
I want to offer special thanks today to the Black Student
Association to Nucleus, to Dwight Mullen,
to Diedre Wiggins for their work to make today a reality and in a
special way to Bunny Halton, who coordinated this very,
very significant day.
And if I might I would like to direct my brief introduction
particularly to the students who are in attendance today.
You are about to meet a man who is not only an important figure
in American history but a man who has made and continues to
make history in our nation, a man who has embraced a cause and
helped to make it a movement.
Be it as founder of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating
Committee, as a state legislator in Georgia,
as president of the Southern Poverty Law Center,
as a distinguished member of the faculty at American University
in University of Virginia, as author,
lecturer, or as chair of the NAACP,
Julian Bond's life is vivid testimony that one individual
whose voice is loud and clear and strong
can make a difference.
That one individual who is ready to sacrifice life's easy path
can effect change.
That one individual brings passion and conviction to the
struggle for human dignity and social justice can make
the world a better place.
You, who are students here today,
hold within you the promise of such a life.
A life made rich because you have touched history
and shaped its course.
Our guest today in the extraordinary measure of his
life's achievement, achievement born in the restless pursuit of
social justice, an achievement that continues today in the
relentless pursuit of human dignity offers the most eloquent
testimony that you each and every one of you can shape
the course of history.
So it is in recognition of his most powerful and exceptional
example and with a great sense of honor and powerful
inspiration that I join you in welcoming Julian Bond.
[applause]
>> Julian Bond: Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.
Thank you.
That's good enough, thank you.
Thank you a great deal, Mr. Chancellor
for that kind introduction.
Thank you ladies and gentlemen for your warm welcome.
It goes without saying; it's a great,
great pleasure for me to be here today.
I have to tell you when I received the invitation I was
curious about why it had been extended.
On the one hand it could've been because I am the chairman of the
board of the biggest, baddest, best civil rights organization
in the United States.
[laughter and applause]
But then, but then maybe, maybe that wasn't the reason.
Then I thought perhaps it's because the people in Asheville
knew about my close, intimate, personal relationship with the
premier figure of the 20th century movement for civil
rights, the late Dr. Martin Luther King.
And if they don't know about it, well I'm going to tell you about
it right now.
I'm sure that many people in this audience who have heard
someone say I was a student of Dr. Kings.
We know Dr. King only taught one time.
[laughter]
He only taught one class, only six people in the class.
I'm one of the six.
[laughter]
So, I'm one of the six people in the whole universe
who can honestly say I was a student of Martin Luther Kings.
Now I wish I could tell you that I had taken extensive notes
in class.
[laughter]
And I had kept them until today but I didn't do that.
I wish I could tell you I had the whit to bring a tape
recorder to class.
I tape-recorded these pearls of wisdom that fell from the lips
of this marvelous man but I didn't do that either.
In fact I'm not ashamed to say that I remember nothing that
passed between teacher and student in the class.
[laughter]
But, I do remember one day he and I were walking
across the beautiful, beautiful Morehouse College campus and
I turned to him and I said Doc, his friends called him Doc
I said Doc, how you doing?
He said, Julian I'm not doing well.
He said unemployment is high, racism is everywhere,
segregation seems immovable.
I feel awful, he said.
I have a nightmare.
I said no, Doc turn that around.
Try I have a dream.
[laughter and applause]
So, I'm happy to be here today.
And I want to talk about a subject that many,
many people think about and many,
many people talk about but few people actually discuss and that
is the subject of race.
For many people the mere mention of the word or even descriptions
of the various races, which make up America for many people it's
divisive setting one American against another,
one neighbor against another.
But the truth is most Americans of different races
are not neighbors.
They tend to live and to work and to study apart.
And they do so because of a long history.
And without an understanding of that history of our past there
can be no common understanding of our present and no
understanding of the role race has played and continues to play
in all of our lives.
It was 50 years ago this coming April,
that Martin Luther King Jr. preached his first sermon as the
brand-new pastor of Montgomery's Dexter Avenue,
Baptist Church.
He was 25 years old.
One month later on May 17, 1954 the United States Supreme Court
in Brown versus the Board of Education unanimously declared
that segregated schools violated the Constitution's protection
promise of equal protection.
So as we commemorate the 50th anniversary of that landmark
decision it's easy to cast a cynical eye on the status of
race relations in the United States and easy to minimize
the significance of that decision.
But that's a grave mistake for Brown by destroying segregation
legality gave a nonviolent army the power to destroy
segregations morality as well.
Thus it's no coincidence that this year we also celebrate the
40th anniversary of the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964,
the most sweeping civil rights legislation before or since and
our democracies finest hour.
So in 2004 as we celebrate these anniversaries it will be a time
to examine our present in relation to our past.
And as we prepared to engage in national elections,
2004 will be a time for examination of our present in
relation to our future.
We look back on the years between Brown and 54 and the
passage of the 64 civil rights act with some pride.
Martin Luther King's first national address was at a 1957
prayer pilgrimage on the third anniversary of Brown
at the Lincoln Memorial.
In 1963 alone the year that King fresh from the battlefields of
Birmingham told the nation of his dream at the March on
Washington there were more than 10,000
antiracist demonstrations.
Now, King was the most famous and best-known of the modern
movement's personalities but it was a People's movement.
It produced leaders of its own.
It relied not on the noted but the nameless,
not on the famous but the faceless.
It didn't wait for commands from afar to begin a campaign
against injustice.
It saw wrong and acted against it.
It saw evil and brought it down.
Those were the days when women and men of all races and creeds
worked together in the cause of civil rights.
Those were the days when good music was popular and when
popular music was good.
[laughter]
Those were the days and the president picked the
Supreme Court and not the other way around.
[cheering and applause]
Those were the days when we had a war
on poverty and not a war on the poor.
And those were the days when patriotism was a reason for
open-eyed disobedience not an excuse for blind allegiance.
[cheering and applause]
Those were the days when the news media
was really fair and balanced. [laughter]
And not just stenographers for the powerful.
But none of those days, none of those days
was the good old days.
In those days the laws the court the schools and almost every
institution favored whites.
This, according to John Hope Franklin,
this was white supremacy.
Martin Luther King described it in the 1962.
He said then when you have seen vicious mobs lynch your mothers
and fathers at will and drown your sisters and brothers at
whim, when you have seen hate-filled policeman curse,
kick, and even kill your black brothers and sisters,
when you've seen the vast majority of your 20 million
*** brothers smothering in an airtight cage of poverty in the
midst of an affluent society, when you suddenly find your
tongue twisted and your speech stammering as you seek to
explain to your six year old daughter why she can't go to the
public amusement parks that's just been advertised on
television and see tears welling up in her eyes when she's told
that Fun Town is closed to colored children and see ominous
clouds of inferiority beginning to form
in her little mental sky.
And see her beginning to distort her personality by developing an
unconscious bitterness toward white people,
when you have to concoct an answer for a five-year-old son
who's asking, "Daddy why do white people treat colored
people so mean?"
When you're harried by day and haunted by night by the fact
that you're a ***, living constantly on tiptoe stance,
plagued with inner-fears and outer resentments never quite
knowing what to expect next, when you're forever fighting
a degenerating sense of nobodyness,
then King concluded, then you will understand.
And you will understand that most blacks then in the south
could not vote.
They attended inadequate, segregated schools,
if they went it all and most attended only a few months
each year.
Most could not hope to gain an education beyond high school.
Most worked as farmers or semiskilled laborers.
Few owned the land they farmed or even the homes
in which they lived.
This was a massive system of racial preferences,
a vast affirmative action plan for whites.
Enforced by law and terror.
It had one name and one aim, to crush the human development
of a whole population.
It began with slave catching in Africa and it continues on to
the present day.
Only by acknowledging the name, the nature and the scope of the
problem can we measure the magnitude of our successes and
the cost of our failures.
When the Supreme Court announced in May of '55 that the white
south could make haste slowly in dismantling segregated schools,
I was a year older than Emmett Till.
His death three months after the second Brown decision in 1955
was much more immediate to me then the court's decision
had been.
We were nearly the same age when he was murdered in
Money Mississippi for whistling at a white woman.
His death and the black newspapers that came in my
Pennsylvania home; The Pittsburgh Courier,
The Baltimore Afro American had created a great vulnerability in
fear of all things Southern in my teenage mind.
And when my parents announced in 1957 that we were moving to
Atlanta, I was filled with dread.
Emmett Till's death had frightened me.
But in the fall of 1957 a group of black teenagers encouraged me
to put that fear aside.
These young people, the nine young women and men who
integrated Central High School in Little Rock Arkansas set a
high standard of grace and courage under fire as they dared
the mobs who surrounded their school.
Here I thought is what I hope to be if ever the chance
comes my way.
The chance and test to prove myself did come my way in 1960
as it came to thousands of other black high school and college
students across the South.
First through the sit-ins, then in the freedom rides then in the
voter registration and political organizing drives in the rural
South we joined an old movement against white supremacy that had
deep strong roots.
For many of us however, it was the recent Brown decisions that
had created the opportunity for young people to play an active
role, to seize and share leadership in the movement
for social justice.
Brown was the movements' greatest legal victory.
It challenged the legal status of black Americans and
ironically made challenges to the established movements'
narrow reliance on legal action more possible.
As Richard Kluger has written, "not until the Supreme Court
acted in 1954 did the nation acknowledge it had been blaming
the black man for what it had done to him.
His sentence to second-class citizenship had been commuted.
The quest for meaningful equality,
equality in fact as well as in law had begun".
I believe in an integrated America integrated jobs,
homes and schools.
I believe in it enough to have spent my life
in its allusive pursuit.
I think it a legal, moral and political imperative for
America, a matter of elemental justice simple right waged
against historical wrong.
Not only have I spent most of my life in this cause,
in 1947 when I was seven years old I was plaintiff in a lawsuit
in rural Pennsylvania against segregated school.
The suit never came to trial.
The school board had segregated students by giving students
achievement tests which all blacks failed
and all whites passed.
But when the two big dumb sons of the local white political
boss failed the test, they closed the black school and all
of the Lincoln University villages children went to a
one room school together.
Last fall I visited Berea College in Kentucky open by
abolitionists as an integrated school in 1855.
It was closed by the civil war but opened again in 1866 with
187 students 96 blacks and 91 whites.
It dared to provide a rare commodity in the former slave
states and education opened to all blacks and whites,
women and men.
One of these early students was my grandfather,
James Bond.
[laughter]
Like, like many others...
like many others I'm the grandson of a slave.
My grandfather was born in 1863 in Kentucky.
Freedom didn't come for him until the 13th amendment
was ratified in 1865.
He and his mother were property like a horse or a chair.
As a young girl she'd been given away as a wedding present to a
new bride and when that bride became pregnant her husband,
that's my great-grandmother's owner and master,
exercised his right to take his wife's slave as his mistress.
That union produced two children,
one of them my grandfather.
At age 15 barely able to read or write he hitched his tuition,
a steer to a rope and walked 100 miles across Kentucky to
Berea College and the college took him in.
My grandfather belonged to a transcendent generation
of black Americans.
A generation born into slavery, freed by the Civil War,
determined to make their way as freewomen and men.
From Berea he studied for the ministry,
married, had six children one of them my father
Horrace Mann Bond.
My father graduated from Pennsylvania's Lincoln
University, earned a doctorate in education from
The University of Chicago.
For him to education was a means to a larger end,
the uplift of his people, and the salvation of his race.
How fitting then, that he would be asked to help the NAACP and
its legal campaign against segregation,
the campaign that culminated in Brown versus
the Board of Education.
There can be no mistake.
Those fifty years since Brown have seen the fortunes of Black
Americans advance and retreat, but the decision is always cause
for sober celebration, not for impudent dismay.
We celebrate the brilliant legal minds who were the architects of
Brown v. Board, we celebrate the brave families who were its
plaintiffs, and we celebrate the legal principle that remains its
enduring legacy, that in the words of chief justice
Earl Warren, the Doctrine of "separate but equal"
has no place.
The quest for meaningful equality,
political and economic equity, remains unfulfilled for today,
but that's no indictment of past efforts,
it's testament to our challenge.
When my grandfather graduated from Berea in 1892,
the college asked him to deliver the commencement address.
He said then, "The pessimist from his corner looks out on the
world of wickedness and sin, and blinded by all that is good or
hopeful in the condition and the progress of the human race,
bewails the present state of affairs and predicts
woeful things for the future.
In every cloud he beholds a destructive storm,
in every in flash of lightning an omen of evil,
and in every shadow that falls across his path,
a lurking foe.
He forgets that the clouds also bring life and hope,
that the lightning purifies the atmosphere that shadow and
darkness prepare for sunshine and growth and that hardships
and adversity nerve the race, as the individual,
for greater efforts and grander victories,
greater efforts and grander victories.
That was a promise made by the generation born into slavery
more than 140 years ago, that was the promise made by the
generation that won the great world war for democracy almost
six decades ago, that was the promise made by those who
brought democracy to America's darkest corners four decades
ago, and that is the promise we must all seek to honor today.
We meet as our nation is engaged in an unwise war of occupation
in the Persian Gulf, war without reason or necessity,
war whose primary rationale has now morphed from weapons of mass
destruction, to weapons of mass destruction
related program activities.
[applause]
The NAACP opposed unilateral war against Iraq,
but we are as one with all Americans in supporting
our fighting forces.
We commend the bravery and sacrifice of our women and men
in uniform, we pray for a swift return of our fighting forces to
America's shores, and a just and lasting peace
at home and abroad.
When Martin King spoke out against America's war in Vietnam
in 1965, he said he was revolted at the hypocrisy of America's
claims of freedom overseas when blacks enjoyed
few freedoms here.
"War abroad," He said, "stole from American's at home".
"The pursuit of widened war," he said,
"has narrowed domestic welfare programs,
making the poor, white and ***,
bare the heaviest burdens at the front and at home."
How sadly true those words ring today.
We know America's twin towers, freedom and justice,
are still standing.
It's our job to keep upright what others would weaken
and destroy.
We know America's strongest when she is just,
and she is fiercest when her people are free.
Less than a week after the September 11th attacks,
President George W. Bush went to the Washington
Islamic Center.
Standing in his stocking feet, the president vowed to prevent
hate crimes and discrimination against Arabs and Muslims in the
wake of these attacks, and he renewed this vow on the first
anniversary of 9/11.
The President's two stated goals,
retaliation against terrorist abroad,
promotion of tolerance here at home,
are reminiscent of the double V campaign waged by blacks during
World War II.
It then symbolized victory against fascism abroad,
victory against racism here at home.
With the events of September 11th,
we realize we've not yet achieved either victory.
Not yet against tyranny abroad, and not yet against racism
here at home.
Just as this enemy, terrorism, is more difficult to identify
and punish, so is discrimination,
a much more elusive target today.
No more do signs read white and colored,
the law now requires the voters booth and schoolhouse door to
swing open for everyone.
No longer are they closed to those whose skins are black,
but despite impressive increases in the number of black people
holding public office.
Despite our ability to sit, eat, ride,
vote, go to school in places that used to bar black faces,
in some important ways, non-white Americans face
problems more difficult to attack now than in all the years
that went before.
The NAACP, whose board I chair, has always been non-partisan,
but that doesn't mean we're not critical.
The passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting
Rights Act of 1965 marked the beginning of the dependence of
the Republican Party on the politics of racial division,
to win elections and gain power.
By playing the race card in election after election,
they've appealed to the dark underside of American culture.
To that small minority of Americans who reject democracy
and equality, they preach racial neutrality and they practice
racial division.
They celebrate Dr. King, and they misuse his message.
Their idea of reparations is to give war criminal
Jefferson Davis a pardon.
Their idea of equal rights is the American and Confederate
flag flying side-by-side.
Their idea of compassion is to ask the guest at the
millionaires' banquet if they want an extra helping or a
second dessert.
They've tried to patch the leaky economy,
and every other domestic problem,
with duct tape and plastic sheets.
They draw some of their most rabid supporters from the
Taliban wing of American politics.
And what about the other party?
Too often they're not an opposition.
They're an "amen" corner.
With some notable exceptions, they've been absent without
leave from this battle for America's soul.
When one party is shameless, the other party can't afford
to be spineless.
[applause]
The economic imbalances we face not only mean
difficult times for many, they also undermine
democratic values.
The danger is that plutocracy will prevail over democracy,
that the free market will ride roughshod over the free citizen.
The reason for the current deficit and the vanished
surplus, can be placed scarily on the tax give-away
to the rich.
To make up for just the initial tax cuts,
we'd have to cut spending by 5 billion dollars,
five days a week for over a year.
That was the whole point, to further enrich the already
wealthy, and to starve the government,
making it unable to meet human needs,
signing a death warrant for social programs for decades and
decades yet to come.
We have a president who talks like a populist,
and governs for the privileged; we have an attorney general who
is a cross between J. Edgar Hoover and Jerry Farwell.
[applause]
And we have a senate majority leader who has voted
consistently against labor rights,
against civil rights, and against women's rights,
and he is the one who replaced the bad guy,
only one senator, Russell Feingold of Wisconsin,
voted against the first hastily prepared and ill-considered
terrorism measure proposed after September 11th.
He explained his vote this way, "If we lived in a country that
allowed the police to search our home at any time for any reason,
if we lived in a country that allowed the government to open
your mail, eavesdrop on our phone conversations or intercept
your email communications, if we lived in a country that allowed
the government to hold people indefinitely in jail based on
what they write or think, or based on mere suspicion that
they are up to no good, then the government would no doubt
discover and arrest more terrorists,
but that probably would not be a country in which we would want
to live, nor do we want to live in a country that permits
infiltration and surveillance of religious and political
organizations, yet the new FBI guidelines proposed by
J. Edgar Ashcroft do just that."
[laughter] Now just as we remember
J. Edgar Hoover, we remember his counter-intelligence program,
it was called co-in tell-pro.
And whose intelligence was it they wanted to counter?
In a program called "Racial Matters" the FBI tried to
disrupt the Civil Rights movement,
they tried to smear Dr. King.
They not only wanted him discredited,
they wanted him dead.
They threatened him with the release of damaging information
if he did not take his own life.
We thought we'd put a stop to Hoover's program of spies and
lies in the 1970s after these abuses were discovered.
Now under the guise of fighting terrorism,
the FBI's going back to spying on law-abiding citizens.
War and fear often cause hasty mistakes,
costly both in economic and in human terms.
We need to remember what we are fighting for.
In the summer of 1918 one of the NAACP's founders,
on the eve of America's entry into World War I,
urged black Americans to forget our special grievances,
close ranks shoulder to shoulder with our fellow citizens and the
allied nations fighting for democracy.
The criticism he faced then was immediate and loud.
He quickly reversed his position and he realized then as we must
now, that calls for a retreat from our rights
are always wrong.
He understood then as we must now that when wars are fought to
save democracy the first casualty is usually
democracy itself.
That's why we have to be vigilant against the steady
erosion of American values and the basic rights we hold dear.
We ought to remember the words of Ohio Sen.
Robert Taft and I never thought I'd be quoting Robert Taft.
[laughter] We ought to remember the words of Senator Robert
Taft, who said two weeks after Pearl Harbor had been attacked,
I believe he said "there can be no doubt that criticism in time
of war is essential to the maintenance of any kind of
democratic government."
And we ought to remember the words of President Theodore
Roosevelt, who said in 1918, "To announce there must be no
criticism of the president, or to stand by the president right
or wrong, is not only unpatriotic and servile,
but is morally treasonous to the American public."
[applause] The FBI and the CIA kept files on me in the 1960s;
they may be keeping files on me today.
But while they were watching, and following,
and photographing, and wiretapping those of us working
non-violently in the freedom movement,
a wave of white terrorism was sweeping across the south
without challenge.
It has taken forty years and more to bring a pitiful few of
those terrorists to justice, and it has taken forty years and
more to put in place a framework for civil rights enforcement,
a framework now threatened on several fronts.
The administrations judicial nominees are hostile to the
basic principles of civil rights law and
civil rights enforcement.
They oppose the core constitutional principle of one
person, one vote.
They've supported federal funding for racially
discriminatory schools.
Among those staffing the voting rights sections of the justice
department is the lawyer who ran the purge of Florida's voting
roles before the 2000 elections.
Another is a former senior council for the misnamed Center
for Equal Opportunity, an organization founded to fight
laws requiring racial justice in America.
Organizations dedicated to overturning the gains of civil
rights movement are now dictating public policy.
They will not rest until white preferences are restored.
Their very names are fraudulent and their aims are frightening.
They have stolen our vocabulary and they want to steal the just
spoils of our righteous war.
They're sophisticated and well-funded,
and over the past decade they've won several victories in the
plot to dismantle justice and fair play.
For more than a decade they've waged ideological war against
moderation in the federal judiciary,
and then they've squealed the loudest when the extremists they
support are turned away.
Now they've ascended to unprecedented positions of power
in the federal government.
They want to make any consideration of race illegal
and thereby do away with our rights and much of the legacy of
the civil rights movement, including affirmative action.
They say they believe in a colorblind America where race
doesn't count.
Sadly in America, equal opportunity is color-coded.
What they really want is a color-free America,
and they think they'll get there by not counting race.
Affirmative Action was created to fight what Supreme Court
Justice Sandra Day O'Connor called the unhappy persistence
of both the practice and the lingering effects of
racial discrimination.
Affirmative Action has been under attack not because it has
failed, but because it has succeeded.
[applause]
It created the sizable middle class that now
constitutes 1/3rd of all black Americans.
In the late 1960's, the wages of black women in the textile
industry tripled, from 1970 to 1990 the number of black police
officers, lawyers, and doctor's doubled,
black electricians and college students tripled.
Black bank tellers more than quadrupled.
The opponents keep telling us that affirmative action carries
with it a stigma, which attaches to all black people,
as if none of us ever felt any stigma before the words
"affirmative action" were ever spoken.
Why don't they ever make this argument about the millions of
whites who got into Harvard or Yale because dad was an alumnus?
[applause]
Or what about those who got a good job because dad
was president of the company, or president of the United States?
[applause]
You never, never see these people walking around,
heads held low, moaning that everybody in the executive
washroom is whispering about how they got their job,
most of our elite professions have long been the near
exclusive preserve of white men.
I seriously doubt, if a single one of those men is suffering
low self-esteem because he knows,
everybody knows, that his race and his gender helped him
win his job.
Look at it this way: it's the fourth quarter in a football
game between the white team and the black team.
The white team is ahead 145 to 3.
The white team owns the ball, the uniforms,
the field, the goalposts, and the referees.
All of a sudden the white quarterback,
who feels badly about things that happened before he got in
the game, turns to the black team,
and says, "hey fella's, can't we just play fair?"
Of course playing fair in this game is doublespeak,
for freezing the status quo in place,
permanently fixing inequality as part of the American scene.
Affirmative Action is not about preferential treatment for
blacks, rather it's about removing the racial preferences
whites have received for centuries,
giving equal treatment to people denied equality in the past.
Without it, both white and blue collars around black necks would
begin to shrink, with a huge depressive effect on black
education, income, health, and home ownership.
Last term, the Supreme Court upheld the legality of
Affirmative Action in two cases from the University of Michigan.
In doing so, the court gave legal sanction to what we knew
to be morally, socially, and educationally correct.
As quiet as it's kept by those who call themselves colorblind
in his name, Dr. King supported Affirmative Action.
He said in 1963, "it's impossible to create a formula
for the future which does not take into account that society
has been doing something special against the ***
for 100's of years.
How then can he be absorbed into the mainstream of American life
if we do not do something special for him now in order to
balance the equation, and equip him to compete on a just and
equal basis?"
President Bush chose Dr. King's birthday this year to
unilaterally elevate reactionary Charles Pickering to the federal
appeals bench.
His hostility to civil rights and his leniency to cross
burners notwithstanding, and President Bush chose Dr. King's
birthday last year to announce that even though he admits that
society continues to do something special against
minorities, his administration won't do anything special
for them.
He opposed Michigan's efforts to promote diversity among its
student body.
That is so ironic.
After all, the Bush family has enjoyed three generations of
preferences at Yale University, preferences for the first
daughter, for her father before her,
and for his grandfather before him.
Now the Bush administration likes to use Secretary of State
Colin Powell, and national security advisor
Condoleezza Rice as human shields against any criticism
of their record on civil rights.
[applause]
After All, the president's fond of saying,
his administration is more diverse than any in history,
except for the one just before it.
But the day after the administration filed its brief
in the Michigan case, Ms. Rice issued a rare statement
on a domestic issue.
She said, "It's appropriate to use race as one factor among
others in achieving a diverse student body".
And she has acknowledged that affirmative action was
responsible for her employment at Stanford University.
Secretary Powell, for his part, has long been an outspoken
supporter of Affirmative Action, and specifically said he hoped
the University of Michigan would prevail in court.
The civil war that freed my grandfather was fought over
whether blacks and whites shared a common humanity.
Less than ten years after it ended,
the nation chose sides with the losers,
and agreed to continue black repression for almost 100 years.
The freed slaves found their former masters once again
controlled their fate.
American slavery was a human horror of staggering dimensions,
a crime against humanity.
The profits it produced endowed great fortunes and enriched
generations, and its dreadful legacy embraces us all today.
As John Hope Franklin writes, "All whites benefited from
American slavery, all blacks had no rights they could claim their
own, all whites, including the vast majority who owned no
slaves, were not only encouraged,
but authorized to exercise dominion over all slaves,
thereby adding to the system of control.
Even poor whites," Dr. Franklin says,
"benefitted from the legal advantage they enjoyed over all
blacks, as well as from the psychological advantage of
having a group beneath them.
Most living Americans," He said, "do have a connection
with slavery.
They have inherited the preferential advantage if they
are white, or the loathsome disadvantage if they are black,
and these positions are virtually as alive today as they
were in the 19th century."
Now 246 years of slavery, were followed by 100 years of state
sanctioned discrimination, reinforced by public and private
terror, ending only after a major struggle in 1965.
Thus it has been a short 39 years since all black Americans
have been allowed to exercise the full rights of citizens.
Only 39 years since legal segregation
was ended nationwide.
Only 39 years since the right to register and vote
was universally guaranteed.
Only 39 years since the protections of the law and the
constitution were officially extended to all.
Now, some are telling us, those 39 years have been enough.
To believe that is the victory of hope over experience,
to believe that is the victory of self-delusion
of common sense.
The removal over the decades of the 1960's of the more blatant
forms of American Apartheid has made it too easy for too many to
believe that all forms of discrimination have disappeared.
Opinion polls revealed that the majority of whites think racial
discrimination is no longer an impediment for people of color.
In one study 75% of whites said blacks face no discrimination in
obtaining jobs or housing, even as such discrimination daily
becomes more severe.
Polls show most white Americans think equal education
opportunity exists right now, even as our schools are becoming
more, not less, segregated across the country.
The successful strategies of the modern movement for civil rights
were litigation, organization, mobilization,
and coalition, all aimed at creating a national constituency
for civil rights.
That movement marched and picketed and protested against
state sanctioned segregation and it brought that system crashing
to its knees.
Today's times require no less, and in fact insist on more.
Now we find ourselves refighting old battles we thought we'd
already won.
Facing new problems we've barely begun to acknowledge,
but we ought to take heart.
If there's more to be done, we have more to do it with,
much more than those who came before us,
and who brought us along thus far.
As a nation we have a history of aggressive self-help
and voluntarism.
In church and civic club and neighborhood association,
providing scholarships, helping the needy,
promoting social service, but volunteering for social service
does little to change the status quo.
Creating change requires challenging power.
It's never enough just to ignore evil,
it's never enough just to do good,
it's never enough just feed the hungry or house the homeless,
as commendable as these acts are.
It may be helpful to think about our common task in this way: two
men are sitting beside a river, and to their great surprise they
see a baby come floating by.
They jump in and save the child, and to their horror another baby
comes down the stream.
They jump in the water a second time and when that baby's
rescued, to their great surprise a third baby comes floating by.
One man jumps in the water a third time,
and the other man begins to run upstream.
"Come back," says the man in the water,
"We've got to save this child."
"You save it," says the running man,
"I'm gonna find out who is throwing babies in the water and
I'm gonna make him stop."
[applause]
Now I recently heard Professor Lani Guinier,
say that racial minorities, like the canaries that minors used to
carry to warn them when the underground air was becoming too
toxic to breathe, but too many people today want to put gas
masks on the canaries, instead of taking the poison
out of the air.
Too many people want to put life preservers on the babies instead
of stopping them from being thrown in a dangerous,
treacherous flood.
We have a long and honorable tradition of social justice
in this country.
It still sends forth the message that when we act together,
we can overcome, and we have a revitalized NAACP,
prepared for the challenges that lie ahead.
We have no permanent friends.
We have no permanent enemies.
Just permanent interests, and those interests are justice
and freedom.
[applause]
It is a serious mistake,
both tactical and moral, to believe this is a fight that
must be, or should be waged by black Americans alone.
That has never been so in centuries past;
it ought naught be so in the century unfolding now.
Black, yellow, red, white, all are needed in this fight,
all of us implicated in the continuation of inequality.
It will require our common effort to bring it to an end.
Our agenda for this new century must include continuing to
litigate, to organize, to mobilize.
Forming coalitions of the caring and concerned,
joining ranks against the comfortable,
the callous and the smug.
It must include fighting discrimination wherever it
raises its ugly head, in the halls of government and
corporate suites or in the streets,
ensuring every citizen registers and votes,
and guaranteeing the irregularities,
suppression, nullification, and outright theft of black votes
that occurred in 2000 never, never,
never ever happens again.
[applause]
These votes can be a reward for advancing justice,
or they can be punishment for betrayal.
We're tired of fattening frogs for snakes.
We want to demand fair treatment for people with *** and AIDS,
especially for people of color.
This disease strikes African American women more than
any other group.
It doesn't happen to other people,
it happens to us, and we want to demand that criminal justice
cease being an oxymoron.
We know race, more than any other factor,
determines who's arrested, whose tried,
for what crime, who receives what length of sentence,
who receives the ultimate punishment,
and we are determined that we are going to see it stop.
[applause]
And we demand that the unceasing open season on our
people by police come to a stop, and that the criminals
in uniform be punished.
[applause]
And we want to ensure that our children,
in inner city, in suburban, and rural schools receive the best
education, an education that prepares them for the century
just begun.
There's much, much more, none of it easy work,
but we've never wished our way to freedom,
instead we've always worked our way.
By the year 2050, blacks and Hispanics together will be
40% of the nation's population.
Wherever there are others who share our condition and
concerns, we must make common cause with them.
In the National Association for the Advancement of Colored
People, we believe colored people come in all colors.
Anybody who shares our values is more than welcome.
The growth in immigration, the emergence of new and vibrant
populations of people of color, holds out great promise
and great peril.
The promise is that the coalition for justice will grow
larger and stronger as new allies join the fight.
The peril comes from real fears that our common foes will find
ways to separate and divide us.
It doesn't make sense that blacks and Latinos fight over
which of us has the smallest amount of power.
Together we can constitute a mighty force for change.
Racial justice, economic equality,
world peace, these were the themes that occupied Dr. King's
life; they ought to occupy ours today.
We live in a small, small world.
If we could squeeze the world's population into a village of
only 100 people, keeping all the existing ratios the same,
the world would look like this.
There would be 57 Asians, 21 Europeans,
14 from the western hemisphere, north and south,
and 8 Africans.
52 of the 100 would be female, 70 would be non-white.
70 would not be Christians.
6 of the 100 people would own 59% of all the wealth in the
world, and all 6 would be from the United States.
80 of the 100 would live in sub-standard housing,
70 would be unable to read and write.
50 would suffer from malnutrition,
1 would own a computer.
1 would have a college education.
If we look at the world in this way,
we are reminded of our mutual dependence,
and of our mutual responsibilities.
We know our world, our lives changed on September 11th,
we really don't know by how much just yet,
but we know we have a job to do here at home,
as much as abroad.
When I first started working four decades ago,
there were five workers paying in the national retirement
system for every retiree.
Of course there is no way I could know who my five were,
but there's a good chance their names would be Carl,
Ralph, Bob, Steve, and Bill.
When I retire, there are going to be three workers paying into
the retirement system for every retiree,
and there's a good chance their names will be Tamika,
Maria, and José.
And I'm here to tell you that you'd better be sure,
that Tamika, Maria, and José, have the best schools,
the best healthcare, the best jobs,
and the strongest protection against discrimination
they possibly can.
Thank you.
[applause and cheering]
>> Dwight Mullen: How do you respond
to such a powerful address?
What do you say in reaction to a living figure of history?
>> Audience Member [Shouting]: "Please run for president!"
[applause]
>> Mullen: Mr. Bond these are my neighbors.
To my neighbors, to the community residents,
I invite you to respond.
It's so good to see my friends, it's so good,
but first to the students.
Just one piece of advice, y'all know I'm a professor,
that's just what I do. Alright?
When you ask your questions, and this is a question and answer
period, to my students, now listen,
think of Mr. Bond as a book.
It's up to you to turn the page, make him explain what he said.
Ask him to take you to another chapter.
For my neighbors, I'm going to ask you to give these students a
chance to ask those questions, but I invite you to join also.
I'll moderate for, let's say, ten to fifteen minutes,
and then there will be a reception in the lobby.
Is that good Mrs. McQueen?
Welcome. Mrs. McQueen? Welcome, welcome.
[applause]
Questions? Sean, how did I know that?
Sean, come, stand up, stand up.
And I'll try to repeat it so that you can hear.
>> Sean [Student]: Mr. Bond, what roll can we as young
college students play in helping to continue to create the just
spoils of a righteous war?
>> Julian Bond: The question is, "What roll can college students,
or young people, play in this struggle?"
Well there have been young people as an important part of
the struggle since the struggle began,
and they've always played significant roles
in a variety of ways.
The nice thing, or one of the nice things,
about the fight for justice, is that there isn't one way.
There's never been one way.
You know, wherever I go, somebody always says,
"What's the one thing?"
because everyone wants to know what the "one thing" is,
but there is no one thing, and there is no one-way.
So that people who are young, and who have these several
attributes: youth, energy, vigor, curiosity,
they haven't become as cynical as their parents
have, they're still open to change,
they're eager, they want to make their mark,
there are literally dozens of organizations and groups that
are crying out for eager young volunteers to join in them.
They range from my own, the National Association for the
Advancement of Colored People, I know some people out here,
probably, their membership has elapsed,
and if you want to sign up again go to NAACP.org,
and we take credit cards, so you can print out a form,
and you can send in a check.
But there's the NAACP, and if you don't know where your NAACP
is, you click on North Carolina, stand up,
[applause]
and if you want, if you're not computer literate,
you can just go right there, and he'll be glad accommodate you,
and they have a youth chapter too.
So there are just hundreds and hundreds of opportunities for
young people to serve in this fight in some way.
In this struggle, not everyone has to do the same thing.
In fact, it's probably advisable that everyone not do the same
thing, because as that old philosopher Chairman Mao once
said, "let a thousand flowers bloom," and that's what is badly
needed in this movement, for a thousand flowers to bloom.
So there's much space, and there's much desire in this
movement to attract young people and to give young people real
responsibility and real leadership.
>> Audience member shouts: You need to vote.
>> Bond: Yes, the most important thing -- because I'm sorry to
say I'm sorry to say young people that you young people,
oh I used to hate that, you young people but now I can do it
– you young people - of all the demographics in America you
young people have the worst record of registering and voting
of any group of people in the United States.
So that means when elections are being decided the concerns you
have are not being listen to because you're not speaking in
the most important way people can speak in political contest
and that's through casting their votes.
And you can register online you can register online you can
register in your home state online I believe and there's no
reason why you should not be registered to vote.
I'm just wondering, I said the NAACP is nonpartisan.
How many of you are South Carolinians?
A few and of the South Carolinians how many of you've
voted in the recent primary?
Is it too far away?
[laughter]
Don't they have absentee ballots in South Carolina?
So there's no excuse for this.
This is the simplest of citizenship tasks and the
easiest of those tasks to perform and there's no reason
why anyone old enough, eligible enough ought not be
registered to vote.
>> Audience question: It's interesting for me that just the
past couple years since September 11th,
folks have become more interested in civil liberties.
I remember becoming interested in civil liberties under the
Reagan (terrains) back in the 80s when they started tearing up
the fourth amendment with - under the war on drugs.
And it's always - it's a course - a series of courses itself why
we have 2.3 million people in our - imprisoned in America some
six million, I believe under some sort of probation etc.,
judicial oversight.
And I'm wondering if - what it would be like - what your vision
as an attorney - civil rights attorney - what it would be like
if we invested half of our traditional resources in law
enforcement - resources into looking at why there is some 250
billion to 500 billion dollars in money laundering dollars –
drugs, arms trading dollars going through US banks if we
invested half the effort that we spend and pulling people in off
the streets for having a little bit of recreational drugs what
the world might look like in the United States
after that happened.
>> Bond: Well of course, if we had a more evenhanded policy
toward people who are addicted and addiction as some of you
know addiction is an illness and if someone has Tuberculosis or
cancer the cure is not to put them in prison because it's not
likely that the illness will improve in that setting.
It's likely to worsen.
And so if we took the approach that addiction is an illness
which most I think believe it is then there'd be first many,
many fewer people in prison.
We'd be spending much less money on incarceration and
law-enforcement and we'd be in a very different way.
The question was being asked – I thought about something else
mindful that Eric Rudolph was arrested not far away from here.
I have a good friend who is his lawyer and she before that
represented Susan Smith and before that she represented –
or after that she represented Theodore Kaczynski.
Now what do we think about these three people?
Two of them convicted of crime, one of them charged
with serious crime.
I'll tell you what I think, that I wanted to make sure that each
of them had every possible legal protection he or she could have
because if you're not willing to give it to them when my time
comes around I'm afraid I won't get it either.
And so we test ourselves...
[applause]
We test ourselves, we test ourselves on how we treat
the worst people in society how we treat the biggest offenders
in society.
And if we don't give them the protections they require and
demand then we're weakening them for all the rest of us.
I saw this morning looking at TV the discovery of the body of
this little girl - the father of a child who had been kidnapped
and stolen and murdered years and years ago and quite
naturally he's angry, angry at the criminal justice system who
let the killer of his child out of prison prematurely and
allowed him to destroy this little precious life.
But you know we can't allow that understandable emotion and anger
to guide these kinds of decisions.
We can't allow that to happen as much as our heart bleeds and our
sympathies go out to these families devastated in this
awful, awful way.
So it's not just a matter of rollbacks in certain kinds of
civil liberties for certain kinds of people.
We've got to be vigilant and protect civil liberties for
every single person because when one person is denied
we're all denied.
And you know we like to think well they're bad people
I'm a good person.
It's not going to happen to me why should I worry?
You never know.
[applause]
>> Audience member: Thanks for coming.
I think I speak for everyone in the room when saying we love
everything you have to say very much in this liberal microcosm
of America.
Anyway, who would you like to see on the Democratic ticket for
the election and why and also, I also kind of wanted to know what
your organization plans to do during the election?
Hopefully not just endorsing a candidate but maybe what,
what, what actions –
>> Bond: Let me tell you what we're not going to do, okay?
Never in our history - we were formed in 1909,
never in our history have we endorsed a candidate
for public office.
Never in our history have we endorsed a political party and
we don't intend to begin endorsing parties
or candidates today.
We are a nonpartisan organization no matter what
the other people say.
We're rigidly nonpartisan.
We're nonpartisan by reason of the tax exemption the government
has given us and we're not about to risk that tax exemption to
endorse John Smith or Mary Jones or anybody else
for public office.
And we have sanctions against people in our organization who
are in leadership positions who do endorse candidates.
We have sanctions against them.
They step over that line, they're going to face some kind
of sanction.
But I'll tell you what we are going to do and what we do
every election-year.
We're going to – we have 2200 branches scattered around the
United States, about 1700 adult branches,
500 youth branches and each of them is charged to make a major
part of their agenda in these election years the registering
of all the unregistered voters in their community they can
possibly register to vote.
You know, about 50% of people – it's not just 50% of the people
who are registered don't vote, it's 50% of the people
aren't registered at all.
It's not even a decision for them.
So this is an enormous pool of people out there who are not
registered to vote who if they were would be in a position to.
So after registering them then we engage in the process
of educating them.
Since 1914 we have been putting out a report card on Congress.
We just released our report card on this Congress two weeks ago.
You can find it NAACP.org, find out how your member of Congress
voted on issues the NAACP thinks is important.
Whether he or she got an A, B, C, D or F.
So we're going to spread that around so people in our
organization know about these voting records and then as the
election approaches we're going to begin to build up the get out
to vote campaign.
Of course that's the most important part of the whole
process is making sure everybody registered,
turns out and votes.
In some ways it's the most difficult part of the process
because it's the most labor intensive.
You know there a lot of modern ways to bring people to the
polls, television among them.
Big TV ads, Joe Blow is the better candidate,
Joe Smith is no good but of course those cost millions and
millions of dollars and every time you say Joe's no good,
you have the effect of depressing the electorate,
depressing the electorate by people who just can't stand this
kind of negativity in politics and who decide,
I'll just leave that alone.
The best way is by knocking on your neighbor's door and saying,
"We're voting tomorrow, 10 o'clock,
I'll come by and pick you up."
And so we're lucky that we have this enormous grass-roots
membership of 750,000 people who are ready and eager to do that
and we're going to unleash this army so that's what we're going
to do in this election year.
[applause]
>> Mullen: Could we look for two more questions and look towards
the reception? Sorry, I didn't realize – Can I hear you?
Can I please - talk?
[inaudible comment from the audience]
>> Bond: This is one of many, many questions
on which the NAACP has no opinion.
But let me tell you what my opinion is.
The question is what I think about President Bush's implied
threat to support an amendment describing marriage as a union
between a man and a woman.
And I answered that the NAACP has taken no position
on this question.
We are not for it, we're not against it.
We have no position on it.
And what I'm going to tell you right now is my position.
If this amendment -and they just passed one in Ohio,
if this amendment passed this would be the first time we have
amended the Constitution to discriminate against
a class of people.
The very first time we've amended the Constitution to
discriminate against a class of people.
Now people tell me marriage is for the purpose of procreation.
I got married 15 years ago.
Friends, there are not going to be any children.
[laughter]
Okay. I'm telling you, there's not going to be any children
from this marriage.
So that's obviously not what marriage is for,
for everyone.
Marriage is for two people who want the state to recognize
their union and to extend to them the benefits the state
extends to others similarly situated.
[applause and cheering]
Now, you know, in my view - I know many people of faith,
religious people have objections to this but you know
the Bible isn't always instructive.
Isn't there a passage in the Bible that says women undergoing
their menstrual cycle ought to be *** to death?
[laughter] Is anybody who believes that here?
At any rate –
[laughter]
At any rate, this is a civil right.
The Massachusetts Supreme Court just early this week reaffirmed
this is a civil right and if you have religious objections
against it I'd suggest you not do it. Okay?
[cheers and applause]
>> Audience member: My question to you is,
explain how Dr. King's March on Washington Speech
affected you personally?
>> Bond: Well, I was at the March on Washington - I was the
publicity director of the student nonviolent coordinating
committee and each of the publicity directors of each of
the organizations sponsoring the march
had different responsibilities.
The man from the NAACP that was the oldest organization,
his responsibility was to walk around issuing pronouncements.
That's very much what he did.
His name was Henry Lee Moon.
He was a distinguished guy.
He walked around, you know delivering pronouncements.
And it came down a tier and I was at the bottom of that tier.
And my job was giving Coca-Cola's to the movie stars.
[laughter] And I can remember handing Sammy Davis Junior a
Coca-Cola and he said, "Thanks kid."
[laughter]
So, that's one of my big memories of the March on
Washington, but – [laughter] I had – I had - you know people
who had heard Dr. King speak several times had heard some
of those phrases before.
The till justice rolls - those lines from Amos till justice
rolls down like waters and righteousness
is like a mighty stream.
We'd heard those lines before but I don't think any of us
who'd heard him speak a dozen times or more had ever heard him
as good on point as he was that day.
Let me recommend to you a great, great book which I think,
I'm not sure is called The Speech.
It was published last year and what it does is in two separate
columns, runs the written text of Kings Speech and the spoken
text of Kings Speech and the remarkable thing is that
there're large periods when this side is blank,
when he's left the printed page.
And when you see that video again and believe me you'll see
it again, if you notice he begins he's speaking kind of
quick, he's looking down at his notes he's picking up his paper,
he's doing like this and so and so.
And after a while he gets – he knows the crowd is with him and
he's into it and out of his memory he begins to call up
these incredible phrases that you'd swear had been thought
about and written down and no I shouldn't say that I think
I'll say this or cross that out and so on.
So it's just a remarkable performance by the man who
surely was the premier orator of the 20th century
in the United States.
And whose genius was his ability to say the same thing to white
people and to black people.
You know, most people myself included - if this audience was
all black I would've given the same speech but would've been
a different speech.
[laughter]
Now I'm not saying that that's because I'm partial to anybody.
It's just different because you get a different kind of
response, a lot of amen's, a lot of that's right,
a lot of tell it brother, a lot of this,
a lot of that.
[laughter]
You get a different response and the response spurs
the speaker and when I heard that –
yeah, there you go.
[laughter]
When I heard that – and you know these speakers –
you don't want to get me started – you know these speakers have
all these different tricks.
You know, Malcolm X used to say, "Can I have a minute more?"
And you know the people said, "Yes, yes, yes."
[laughter]
And I just heard Jesse Jackson give a speech and
he started saying something and people in the audience said,
"What is that?"
And he said now, "Watch me, watch me."
And he said something else and people said,
"What is that all about?"
And he said, "Watch where I'm going now,
watch where I'm going."
And finally he pulled it all together and everybody said,
"Oh. We see where you're going."
What a marvelous thing.
So anyway, I was tremendously moved by it as I said I'd heard
him many times before.
It's a true story they he did teach me in college - that stuff
about I have a nightmare, that's not true –
[laughter]
But I'd never heard him speak so well and I don't think he spoke
as well in any other circumstance where
I heard him after that. It was tremendously moving and it was
the perfect capstone of the day.
You know, we've forgotten that other people made speeches that
day and many of them made wonderful,
wonderful speeches.
John Lewis, now a congressman was Chairman of SNCC and he made
a wonderful, wonderful speech, a fabulous speech.
A. Philip Randolph made a great speech.
Roy Wilkins made a great speech.
Everybody made a wonderful speech but that was the speech.
And if I'm right about the title,
go in the bookstore and buy this book,
I think it's called The Speech but it's a great book.
>> Mullen: Mr. Bond, on behalf of the student body we have just
a token for you.
It's a windbreaker.
[laughter and applause]
If you want to open it later – this is ceramic art.
Yeah, you'll like it. You'll like it.
[applause]
>> Bond: Thank you all very much.
[applause]
♪ [closing music] ♪
♪ ♪