Writings by Julian Bond

Mose T's Slapout Family Album / Gonna Sit at the Welcome Table / Black Candidates: Southern Campaign Experiences

A Time to Speak, A Time to Act / Eyes on the Prize /  Letters from Mississippi  /  Standing Fats: The Autobiography of Roy Wilkens

Freedomways Reader  / African American Quotations /  Free at Last /  Till Freedom Is Won  / Lift Every Voice and Sing

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What's Next

By Julian Bond

I want to talk about a couple of things. One is very vague and in broad terms is the kind of lives and conflict a rather large number of people in this country have shared, some a great deal and in much more intensity than others. And I would like to suppose that most of the literate and the educated people in this country by now recognize the situation in which Black people find ourselves.

The urgent question for us is not what is wrong but rather what's to be done about it? The problem which we face of course has been studied, surveyed and commissioned a great deal; but the groups undertaking these studies are made up of last year's problem solvers who are still recommending the last decades' solutions to the problems that have been with us since the first Black people arrived on these shores shortly before the Mayflower arrived. presidents have tried "New Frontiers," Great Societies," and now the "New federalism"; the officials of the present administration in Washington tell us that benign neglect is the best approach. In other words the assertion is put forth that we can make progress if we do nothing, and this administration is trying to improve on that rationale by doing even less than that.

Nothing, in this particular instance, means a refusal to find new programs for the poor. President Nixon has castrated the old program and has reduced the little kindling one they have.

Nothing, in this instance, means a failure to take steps to protect Black people from police brutality and the police state tactics employed by the policemen, to make legal the standard practice of "no-knock" and preventive detention that have been the staples of repressive law enforcement since the beginning of the forked tongue.

President Nixon has increased and made legal this kind of brutality.

Nothing means no increase in federal efforts to protect any rights. President Nixon attempted to destroy the 1965 voting rights act, and Congress acting in concert with him has penalized foundations that help . . . voter registration.

Nothing means the failure to push for the desegregation of southern school systems. President Nixon's department of injustice fights court battles for Southern Racists, and for the first time presenting the rather sorry spectacle of the Attorney General for the United States and the Attorney General of Mississippi for the State of Mississippi arguing in Court about the same side of the question.

President Nixon has urged the studies for law and enforcement while he encourages Vice-President Agnew to shout further autocratic and pseudo pornographic political obscenities in our ears. This administration wants law and order in the Black community, but encourages and allows J. Edgar Hoover the use of illegal wiretapping against us.

We are witnessing the beginning of a Totalitarian state, not just fir Black people, but for all the people living in this country. As in George Orwell's prophetic 1984, the first steps are being taken by the destruction of privacy and the subversion of the English language. As in 1984, large segments of the population are becoming so accustomed to oppression that they are no longer shocked by the assassination and imprisonment of dissidents. These are becoming an everyday routine in American life which are tolerated if not actually approved by the silent majority.

Double think, the sophisticated process of confusing words until they begin to mean their opposites, seemed fanciful when George Orwell first wrote his classic. the present administration is turning this fancy into an everyday reality. Words have lost their real meaning and instead mean directly the opposite of what all of us once thought they meant.

Freedom, for example, now means killing Vietnamese in order to make them free; destroying villages for freedom. It means armed fascist dictatorship in Greece and in Cambodia to keep the Greeks and the Cambodian people free. It also means exploiting the resources and people of whole continents in the name of free trade.

Peace means vast preparations for nuclear war, the expansion of the Vietnam war to all of Southeast Asia, the stifling of non-violent protest, and winning wars that were lost even before they were begun.

Benign has come to be an adjective describing the deliberate policy of indifference and neglect. Together now means where we bring people when we call some of them bums and effete snobs.

Protecting free enterprise means spending billions of dollars in subsidies in a novel form: millionaire welfare recipients, for government contractors, monopolistic corporations, and farmers who don't farm. It means, in short, Socialism for the rich and capitalism for the poor.

The political language in twentieth century American society is becoming so polluted with economical double think and hypocrisy that sensible discussion of the issues grows steadily more difficult. There is a great deal of violence in the air. Both the kind of violence supported by antic radicals as well as the kind of mass violence done to the spirit that seemed to flourish so much in America today. Now we know full well that violence does not limit itself to the bomb at night, or the brick through the window, or the mugger's knife; and we ought to know that the crime and criminality are not limited to the crimes of passion that flourish in some Black communities; but rather, violence and criminal elements are running rampant in America life.

It is violent and criminal, we propose, to have Black children go to school for 12 years, and emerge with only six years of education.

It is violent and criminal, we propose, to have Black young men represent disproportionate share of casualties and inductees in Vietnam; making us first in war, last in peace, and seldom in the hearts of our countrymen.

It is violent and criminal, we propose, to call welfare recipients lazy and shiftless, while six-thousand white American farmers are receiving $25,000 a year each to do nothing.

It is violent and criminal, we propose, for a merchant in the Ghetto to charge 150% for a television set or a refrigerator and then wonder why his store is the first to be destroyed when the holocaust comes.

It is violent and criminal, we propose, for some of America's young people, the generation we were told was different from all the rest, it is violent and criminal for them to show more interest in music and drugs, the romantic rhetoric of revolution, the ennobling sacrifices of self enforced poverty, than in the very real problems of human existence that have been taken far too vainly in this country today.

It is violent and criminal, we propose, to promote self-help and the virtues of the "free-enterprise" system for a group of people living in an economy where property has always been more important than people. It is violent to live in a land where the general public spends more money on the faculty board itself, than all governments, municipal, county, state, and national do on education; and where annually more money is spent on primarily pet foods than government spends on food stamps for the poor.

It is racist, we propose, to suggest that Christopher Columbus discovered a country that was steady here and inhabited by a thriving and civilized population.

It is racist, we propose, to have imported a group of already religious people and then to have imposed a strange and alien religion upon them. It is racist generally for one set of people to try to impose their cultural values on another.

Until we hear that the Black people are claiming superiority of James Brown over Beethoven, of the Pyramids of Egypt over the Empire State Building, of Swahili over French and German and Latin, of Langston Hughes and Imamu Baraka over Keats and Shelly and Shakespeare, of Jack Johnson, Muhammad Ali, and Jackie Robinson over Gene Tunney, Jerry Quarry, Rocky Marchiano, of Elijah Muhammad over the Pope, then don't accuse us of racism.

Who then promotes racism on the international level? Who insists on defining politics and racial terms like this: the yellow horde. This nation has an all white cabinet, all of its African ambassadors but one are white. All of its top military leaders are white; all of the directors of all the major corporations are white. All of the trustees of most of its major colleges and universities are white. Ninety-nine out of 100 of its Senators, all of its 50 Governor, and all but 13 of the 435 of its House of Representatives are white. Is that kind of racial, economic, political and educational power structure designed to avoid racial schism, or is it aimed at perpetuating white supremacy and non-white subordination? Who created that power structure? Eldridge Cleaver and Bobby Seale? Stokeley Carmichael and Rap Brown? Cesar Chavez and Corky Gonzalez? Or maybe it was Sitting Bull and Geronimo?

The government presently wants us to believe that rock-n-roll groups, and young revolutionaries put forth a threat to life and society in America, but a four year old child could see the absurdity of that kind of rhetoric. Who created and multiplied the nuclear and thermal nuclear weapons that have been hanging like the sword of Damocles over every living creature on the planet? Who produces the technology of wastes that pours mercury into our rivers, DDT in our food, and metacompounds in our air/

The technocratic oligarchy that has done these things were doing them when the Weathermen, the Young Lords, and the Panthers were still in their cradles, and no one had yet heard of chuck Berry or Elvis Presley, much less Janice Joplin and Jimi Hendrix.

As we enter into the seventies, the rhetoric of the last 20 years of struggle has got to be transformed into some new and much more intense actions. We can't afford twenty more years of preaching that the hour is late; the hour is now. We can't afford the luxury of roaring 'this is the eleventh hour'; it has been midnight since long before President Nixon rose from the dead.

There are all sorts of excuses for their actions. people have stopped being the accomplices and have become the badges of poets.

Young men and women are desperately needed for the struggles in welfare offices, labor offices, political wards and precincts in poverty ridden communities, in the courtrooms and in the streets. they are not needed for some gigantic confrontation of a visionary future; they're needed now, today, where the people are and not where we would like them to be. No one needs to ask 'what can I do?' All of us must keep the battle heard to keep some good men in office and put some others there.

If someone happens to tell you that it makes no difference, or that politics is a bourgeois trip, or that the election of conservatives is always hampered with contradictions, it's obviously not your contradiction that's being hampered. People are already choosing sides to see who gets to challenge President Nixon in 1972. Only an organized constituency to the Senate can make that challenge a reality.

We can't afford the kind of an action which justifies its existence because the inactivists are 'getting ourselves together'. We can't afford the luxury of deciding that this or that method of achieving social change is either too conservative or too militant.

We can't afford to have anyone suggest that politics, or street demonstrations, or group economics (active membership), or any single method is the only method we can use to secure our demands. We cannot afford to mouth the amiable rhetoric of Malcolm X without also adapting his amiable self discipline. We cannot afford to emulate the activity of some radical groups that began Black but are swiftly moving from the gray to the gay, nor other groups whose analysis is the only one, where only true believers can participate in what they think surely must be an all people's massive movement.

Perhaps we might be assured by the thought that the struggle for racial justice, economic equality in America, is racial in root, while its effects upon us are largely economic and psychological, but that they all have an ecological base. The base is anti-ecological in the sense that it rejects the proposition that picking up beer cans on the highway will ever be suitable alternative activity for people who want to bring polluters of our air, water, and land to public justice in concert with the criminal polluters of our lives.

But the base of the problem is surely ecological in the very real sense that the same people who manufacture the automobile that are no good after they are eighteen months old are the same men who refuse to use their expertise and skill and capital to manufacture full employment for men. the base of the problem is ecological only in a sense once stated by the editor of the Saturday Review, who said

To us this must suggest here a comedy in ourselves because of the circumstances in which we find ourselves for condemning them or possibly breaking them to suit our needs rather than crushing us to suit the needs and entertainment of other people.

It requires the realization finally that there is not now and never has been and never will be any real black problem in America. But that there has been internationally the kinds of problems spelled out by the late great W.E.B. DuBois. He said:

Source: Listening: Current Studies in Dialog (Winter 1971), pp. 18-24.