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Copyright by
Julian Bond
April, 1985

^{Fortuitous confluence of this occasion of the 1st celebration of ML King Ho'day.....neighbors teachers colleagues constituents}

[Illegible]

Although Americans have always had a preoccupation with race, it is only in the recent past that the nation began to take aggressive steps to ^{at the insistance of the victims to} inhibit and diminish the white supremacist impulse in the American character.

Forty years ago, the Swedish sociologist Gunnar Myrdal released his classic American Dillemma, issuing a challenge to Americans to match their promises with their practices.

Thirty one [illegible] 3 years ago the United States Supreme Court declared that segregation in the public schools was illegal in Brown vs the Board of Education, Topeka.

In the words of Richard Klugar, "Not until the Supreme Court acted in 1954 did the nation acknowledge that 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 - eqality in fact as well as law - had begun."*

If the depression in 1929 had convinced America it has obliged to protect its citizens' well being, the decisions in 1954 and "55 began to convince reluctant Americans they would have to share their bounty, their knowledge and their world. For the American Negro, as Kluger notes:

"No more would be a grinning supplicant for the benefactions and discards of the master class; no more would he be a party to his own degredation. He was both thrilled that the signal for the demise of his class status had come from on high and angry that it had taken so long and first extracted so steep a price in suffering."**
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*Simple Justice, by Richard Kluger, Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 1976, pp 748.
** Kluger, pp 749.