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Passing the Torch?

by Julian Bond

At one of the too-frequent anniversaries of the 1963 March on Washington - perhaps the 30th anniversary in 1993 - a ceremony was held which featured the symbolic "passing of the torch" from the grizzled and gray-haired generation that had beaten back segregation in the deep South states in the 1960s to the current generation of eager black youth.

I watched the ceremony in horror and disgust, thinking back to my own days as a sit-in protestor and voter registration worker in the early 1960s.

Like many others of my time and place, I was attracted to the 1960 sit-ins against segregated lunch counters because they offered me, at age 20, an opportunity to directly confront and attack an evil system which not only kept me away from an integrated cup of coffee but also from the jobs that even my Morehouse College degree wouldn't have qualified me for.

I would never have the major qualification for many ordinary jobs - dime store clerk, bank teller, policeman who could arrest white people.

The prerequisite for these jobs was a white skin, and the assault on lunch counters was an assault on the barriers that prevented me and thousands of young people like me from realizing our potential.

Segregation and racism frustrated our ever achieving the futures we had trained for; it cheapened the worth of our college degrees. And it crippled the lives of every black person - college students and first grade dropouts. So we sat-in and rode-in and marched and protested - but we also did much more.

We organized. We spent long hours convincing others to make a dangerous attempt to register to vote. To become a member of a brand-new political party. To join a labor union. To take steps that would help improve their lives. To join with others in a struggle that had begun long before we were born and which we hoped would continue after we had left the scene.

By the mid-sixties, we had won some fights - legal segregation was eliminated by the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Discrimination at the ballot box was voted out by the Voting Rights Act of 1965.

With many of my generation - Ben Brown, John Lewis, Marion Barry, Eleanor Holmes Norton, Clarence Mitchell III - I entered politics. Today, like many others, I am an academic, teaching young people at Washington's American University and the University of Virginia about the 20th Century struggle for equal rights.

My students are especially interested in the roles played by young people in that struggle. Among others, I tell them about College student James Farmer meeting with President Franklin Roosevelt.