Speech about looking back upon black history, 1976 (2 of 2)

[letterhead] Julian Bond for the Senate

39th District 361 West View Drive S.W. Atlanta, Georgia 30310 758-9101 755-7050

[signature] Julian Bond

Copyright, 1978 Julian Bond

We stand now near ^{have just passed} our 200th birthday as a people - - afraid of what the future will bring and afraid to look too critically at our past, afraid to assign guilt and ^{] 10} responsibility for our common conditon.

We have a fairly new president, elected by a majority of one, who in turn has chosen a new vice-president. Ourselves in a time of international turmoil and domestic dilemma, of national indecision about the ways and means to stop rising prices and falling expectations. Across the rest of the world, rather swift changes are taking place.

2 In Africa, the people of Mozambique and Guinea-Bissau have reached freedom and self-determination. The North Vietnamese are consolidating their victory over American military might and will soon exercise control over their entire nation.

In Europe, in Latin America - - with some notable exceptions - - the struggle for justice and right against oppression and wrong goes on.

Only in America is there hesitation and faltering, uncertainty and indecision. Only here do popular movements among the oppressed rise and fall as regularly as the phases of the moon. ^{] 4}

The last two - and - one half decades of Black struggle in American life have produced some marvelous victories, often overlooked today as unemployment increases and the economic

3 system nears chaos.

Gains ^Victories were won at lunch counters and movie theatres and polling places and bus stations^; and the fabric of legal apartheid in America was destroyed. What had been a movement for civil rights has become a political movement, and Black men and women are winning ^elective office and power ^{that formerly they only dreamed of}. before

But despite an increase of 150% in the number of Blacks holding office, despite the ability to sit or eat or ride or vote in places that formerly lacked Black faces, in a real way we find our condition unchanged.

A quick look at every statistic that measure how well or poorly a group of people is doing - - infant mortality rates, median family income, life expectancy - - shows that while our general condition has improved, our relative condition has actually worsened.

4

5 It is almost as though ^if we were climbing a molasses mountain dressed in snowshoes, while everyone else rides a rather leisurely ski-lift to the top. Now the ski slopes are more treacherous, and the molasses melting^s into mud, a Sargasso sea of crime in high places. of It is ^{We are foundering in a swamp,} of joblessness for many and hopelessness for more.

Yesterday's gains become suspect. The front ^{of the} bus seat loses meaning for a people whose longest trip is likely to be from the feudal system of the rural South to the mechanized, high-rise poverty of the North.

The right to vote loses ^its meaning for ^to a people forced to choose ^{offered a choice} between Tweedledum and Tweedledee.

The right to an integrated education can mean^s little to children ^{who are} busses^d from one academy ^{of ignorance} to another.