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DIVERSITY

Copyright 2001 by Julian Bond

COPY

Last month there was a New York Times article about the design of the spa at this resort.

The architect, Richard Gluckman, was quoted as saying, "We wanted to reflect the gradations in color of the canyon wall, which goes from a deep rust color at the base to an almost white at the cliff edge."

I want to reflect - and reflect on - the color gradations of our nation's people and how they, together with their corresponding multicultures, like Mr. Gluckman's spa, complement and enhance our natural world.

In the NAACP, we like to say that colored people come in all colors. One of the colors in the spectrum is black, and although it comes in more than one shade, it usually connotes one history - a history of difference, discrimination, and, most often, slavery.

Like many others in this nation, I am the grandson of a slave.

My grandfather was born in 1863, in Kentucky; freedom did not come for him until after the 13th Amendment was ratified in 1865.

He and his mother were property, like a horse or a chair. As a young girl, she had 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.

As a teenager, barely able to read and write, he hitched his tuition - a steer - to a rope and walked 100 miles across Kentucky to Berea College, and Berea took him in. 16 years later, he graduated, and the college asked him to deliver the commencement address.

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