Speech concerning black people and the future, 1977

Julian Bond Atlanta, Georgia copyright 1977

Nearly two decades now have elapsed since the reluctant dawn of still another new era for black Americans. 1960 marked the beginning of a tumultuous time when old dreams, and new dreamers would flourish or die, when swift, often violent upheaval would challenge the nation's two-hundred-year old "separate but unequal" policies.

It began as a conservative time, the celebration of the status quo, when young men and women who called themselves "black" invited the scorn of their elders still fighting to be called capital "N" Negroes. If our history was not familiar

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to the nation, our status was painfully clear. A people whose passage to these shores had been described as "one long line of blood, with tossing limbs and the echoing cries of death and pain, "¹ we had been declared a problem--by the same group who created the "problem", then neglected to develop a solution.

It was a landmark year for young blacks; the question "Where were you during the sit-ins" would become as much a part of the national black litany as a recitation of one's whereabouts at the moment of the murders of John and Bobby Kennedy, or Martin Luther King.

To millions of black teenagers today, the sit-ins, lie-ins and marches, the hoses, cattle prods and jails, the

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fractured skulls and shallow graves that marked the bloody sixties are already distant history, replete with revisionism and indistinguishable from television docu-drama. To black adults, the "protests" symbolized a passing of the torch, unorthodox extensions of the struggle long waged through traditional channels--the NAACP, churches, voter's leagues, and "sitting up" with the white folks. Predictably, some blacks deplored the new activism as jeopardizing existing gains.

It was true that black people had progressed since our arrival in 1620 on the inhospitable shores of the newly-stolen land. We were no longer bartered and used like plows and bags of seed. We were better off than the four million freed

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at emancipation who set about to raise families and make a living without, for the most part, skills, money, and land. We had survived reconstruction, Jim Crow, Lynch Law, disenfranchisement, discrimination, and segregation. Survived several depressions, two great wars, and the witch hunts of the McCarthy era. We had survived--although some of us didn't recognize his symptoms in time to prevent a national disgrace--the "Checkers" speech of the man who this year proclaimed himself a "paranoid for peace" and claimed his prize of $600,000 on the television spectacle, "Deface the Nation."

Through it all, we had struggled to climb out of degradation, poverty, illiteracy; to get--and keep--a decent job,

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and to insure a better life for our children. And in 1960, when a new President asked what we could do for our country, the answer was soon forthcoming.

Setting aside intellectual discussion in favor of organization, young blacks tested political theory with their feet. Dialectic took a back seat to a lunch counter sit-in, to drinking from a certain water fountain; to riding the bus in the seat of our choice, and registering to vote for the candidate of our choosing. Lives were changed, and some were lost, along the way. Mrs. Fannie Lou Hamer, whose death earlier this year was not so much from disease as from living and fighting for human rights in rural Mississippi, summed it up: "We didn't come for