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Bond scorches Bush, introduces CEO at NAACP Convention

Posted 7/17/08

By Hazel Trice Edney
NNPA Editor-in-Chief

WASHINGTON (NNPA) – NAACP Chairman Julian Bond, at the organization’s 99th National Convention in Cincinnati this week, showed no letting up on his marathon of criticism of President George W. Bush, this election year saying Bush has “united Americans around a desire for change.”

Recalling threats from the Internal Revenue Service because of what the IRS implied were partisan attacks in recent years, Bond continued in his vintage in-your-face style.

“President Bush said he wanted to be a uniter. It took him seven years, but boy, has he succeeded. He has united Americans around a desire for change. He has united Americans in our anxiety – about our economic well-being and our dreams deferred; about an unpopular war of choice; and about America’s reduced standing in the world,” he said. “In 2004, the Internal Revenue Service threatened to revoke the NAACP’s tax exempt status because I dared to criticize President Bush. During the civil rights movement, we sang songs to bolster our resolve. One of them said, ‘Ain’t gonna let nobody turn me around.’ Well, we ain't gonna let nobody turn us around, including the IRS, and the NAACP will continue to speak truth to power until this administration leaves town.”

In the past, Bond has described the political operations of the Bush administration AS everything from “the Taliban wing of American politics” to “snake oil”.

When the IRS threatened the organization’s tax exempt status four years ago, Bond held his ground. The case was eventually dropped.

“What the NAACP did not do in 2004 and will not do now is endorse a candidate. We always have been and we always will be scrupulously non-partisan,” Bond said. “But that doesn’t mean we necessarily reject partisanship. It has its place, especially when our two major political parties exist on two separate planets, and one is dominated by neo-cons, theo-cons, and nativists.”

With that, Bond expressed excitement to the audience of thousands about the presidential candidacy of Sen. Barack Obama, the presumptive Democratic nominee and possibly the nation’s first black president.

“The country seems proud, and rightly so, that a candidate campaigning in cities where he could not have stayed in a hotel 40 years ago has won his party’s nomination for the nation’s highest office,” Bond says.

However, he pointed to the racial stereotypes and White supremacy that still exists.

“On the heels of Barack Obama’s clinching the nomination came the crude dissing of Michelle Obama as his ‘baby momma’ and the suggestion by Ralph Nader that Obama ‘wants to talk White’,” Bond said.

Meeting the year before the NAACP’s 100th birthday celebration, Bond pointed out that the organization has faced major financial woes as well as a dwindling membership.

Having claimed up to a half million members in recent decades, the organization documented approximately 250,000 two years ago during the presidential administration of Bruce Gordon.

“In all these 99 years, we’ve never had enough members or enough money and we do not have enough of either today,” Bond said.

He expressed hope in incoming President and CEO Benjamin Todd Jealous who has vowed to rebuild the organizational membership.

“The man we have chosen as our new CEO knows all about organization – he organized his first voter registration drive when he was 14 years old and has devoted all of his professional life to the issues and causes that are the mission of the NAACP. Now 35, he is the youngest person ever chosen to lead us,” he said to applause.

Also introducing Jealous’ wife, Lia Epperson, he praised the couple, saying they share their life’s work. Jealous is a former Black Press journalist who became executive director of the National Newspaper Publishers Association, a federation of 200 black-owned newspapers. He is currently president of San Francisco’s Rosenberg Foundation and will start his new job with the NAACP Sept. 1.

Epperson, a Harvard University graduate, is formerly a lawyer with the NAACP Legal Defense Fund and a law professor. Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome Ben Jealous and Lia Epperson.

Bond compared Jealous to pioneer journalist, NAACP founder and reformer Ida B. Wells.

“When she was told to move to a blacks-only train car, she not only refused – she bit the conductor as he threw her off the train. Then she sued, winning $500 in damages. We are still biting the conductor – and Ben Jealous has sharp teeth!”

Despite lower numbers and financial Woes, Bond says the consistency of the organ-ization’s message on behalf of black people has kept it strong.

“A recent survey confirms that our work is both valuable and valued. The NAACP has the highest favorability of 17 organizations working in the civil rights arena. The NAACP is viewed favorably by almost all blacks – 94 percent, including 70 percent who view it very favorably,” he said.

With that, Bond listed a litany of charges against the Bush administration, including bringing the nation to “the brink of disaster” with “increas-ing incoming inequality, a nationwide hous-ing crisis and skyrocketing gas prices.”

He added that Bush led the nation to war on false premises, and the fact that the number of troops killed in Iraq has exceded 4,000. He compared what he described as the Bush administration’s “abuse of power” to that of the Civil War and Vietnam days, including COINTEL-PRO, the FBI counter intelligence program that disparately investigated and harassed Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and other black leaders in the 1960s.

“We thought we had put a stop to these kinds of spies and lies, but that was before September 11,” Bond said. “Before wiretapping without warrants. Before torture. Before the abolition of habeas corpus rights for detainees. Before the Supreme Court stopped the Bush Administration an unprecedented four times from making a bonfire of the Constitution.”

There must be a reconstruction he concluded, still hammering Bush.

“After eight years of this Administration, we are going to need another reconstruction – reconstruction of a government which has been purposefully dismantled, privatized and politicized.”

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