Bond Must Go

by Shavar Jeffries


Julian Bond opened the NAACP convention yesterday with a speech as banal as it was irrelevant. Once again, he focused his fire on the Bush Administration, unloading invective after tired invective on the failures of the White House to address the material needs of the Black community.

He compared the federal government's inert response to Katrina to lynching ("Katrina, like lynching, not only destroyed the work of generations in a single day, but is resulting in a deliberate effort to dispossess black landholders."); he declared that the rejection of immigration reform further repudiates the Bush Presidency ("The extent of the [people's] repudiation, it was evident late last month when the immigration reform bill . . . died in the Senate."); and the coup de grace: he charged that the voluntary-integration decision alienated Black children from the law ("The Bush Court removed black children from the law's protection.") (I'm going to deal with that specific charge in a separate post).

In the process, he also reminded us that his NAACP is a social-justice organization concerned with racial discrimination, not a social-services organization concerned with meeting the practical needs of Black people: "[W]e are dedicated to an aggressive campaign of social justice, fighting racial discrimination.

We've done this in the past and will continue to do it in the future."Bond seems incapable of appreciating the yawning gulf between his vision for the NAACP and the concrete needs of the masses of Black families, who struggle mightily to raise children in communities ravaged by joblessness, bad schools, gang violence, single motherhood, and perhaps most pernicious, hopelessness. He offers nothing in the sort of a strategy to pragmatically address these challenges. Instead, he offers stale bromides about the twin obsessions of Bond's NAACP: government and White folk. As Bond would have it, Black folk's capacity to generate solutions to their challenges is apparently limited to petitioning either of these external powers.


And because the Bond NAACP's approach is so preoccupied with outside forces, he's left with little but the ad hominem when those forces don't share his concern for the Black community.Sadly, the NAACP -- the grand organization founded by W.E.B. DuBois and which was indispensable to the dismantling of Jim Crow -- is now a relic. We badly need a re-imagined, reinvigorated NAACP. As long as Julian Bond is at the helm, that new reality is implausible. Bond must go