Julian Bond
The Moment to Decide
President Schapiro, Reverend Spalding, members of the faculty, administrators, parents, family members, friends – and most importantly, members of the class of 2005 – it is a high honor to have been asked to speak today.
Ceremonies like this one inevitably call to mind my first commencement, my graduation from high school many years ago. The speaker then was the late Dr. Mordecai Johnson, President of Howard University. He spoke – without notes – in the hot afternoon sun – for almost two hours. As I listened I thought, “Someday I’ll get a chance to do that.”
Luckily for you, this isn’t it.
It is, however, the occasion for congratulations to you and reflections from me.
I am the grandson of a slave.
My grandfather was born in Kentucky in 1863, and because of this, freedom didn’t come for him until the thirteenth 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 gift to a new bride, and when that bride became pregnant, her husband – that’s my great-grandmother’s master and owner – exercised his right to take his wife’s slave as his mistress. That union produced two children, one of them my grandfather.
Your presence here attests to the value you place on education and your willingness to make sacrifices to obtain it. The same was true for my grandfather.
At age 15, 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 the college took him in. Thirteen years later, he graduated, eventually earning a doctorate.
After my grandfather had children of his own, he wrote of parents’ “sacred obligation of giving their children the best education they are capable of taking and that the parents are able to provide.” [James Bond, “The Education of the Bond Family,” (April, 1927)]
That makes me think of Shirley Davidson and her parents. In 1959, Shirley was six years old – the only African-American child on her block in Farmville, Virginia. In preparation for school, her mother made sure she had all her shots and new school clothes.
Every day she watched the school bus from the new tax-supported all-white private school roll down her street, pick up every white child, and pass her by. No bus came for Shirley.
That was because her school system chose to shut down rather than integrate in compliance with the Supreme Court’s 1954 decision in Brown v. Board of Education.
That was when Shirley began her make-believe school. She would gather her books together in the morning and go outside on the sidewalk. The school bus would pass her by. Every afternoon when the school bus returned, she’d be on the sidewalk, pretending.
I hope, graduates, that as you contemplate what you receive when you are handed your diplomas tomorrow you will think of Shirley Davidson. And of the tens of thousands of others who have experienced the tragedy and triumph that is the history of our national struggle to come to grips with the unsolved problem of race.
And I hope you will not pretend that this struggle has nothing to do with you.
As James Russell Lowell’s powerful poem reminds us:
For mankind are one in spirit,
and an instinct bears along,
Round the earth’s electric circle,
the swift flash of right or wrong;
Whether conscious or unconscious,
yet humanity’s vast frame
Through its ocean-sundered fibers,
feels the gush of joy or shame; --
In the grain or loss of one race,
all the rest have equal claim.
An ardent abolitionist, Lowell wrote that poem – “The Present Crisis” – in 1844, in opposition to the proposed annexation of Texas to the United States as a slave state.
Sixty-five years later, in 1909, three people met to form what would become the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), whose Board I chair. One was the descendant of abolitionists, the second was Jewish, and the third was a southerner – whose mother’s people were Kentucky slaveholders as my father’s people were Kentucky slaves.
They issued a Call, taking stock of the nation’s progress since the end of the Civil War, and asking then as we ask today:
“How far has it gone in assuring to each and every citizen, irrespective of color, [the] equality of opportunity and equality before the law, which underlie our American institutions and are guaranteed by the Constitution?"
The original incorporation papers of the NAACP listed as its goals:
“To promote equality of rights and eradicate caste or racial prejudice among the citizens of the United States; to advance the interest of colored citizens; to secure for them impartial suffrage; and to increase their opportunities for securing justice in the courts, education for their children, and complete equality before the law.”
That remains our mission today.
When the founders discussed a name for the NAACP’s magazine, one of them, Mary White Ovington, the daughter of abolitionists, mentioned her love for Lowell’s poem. And so the name chosen was The Crisis, as it remains the name today.
Writing in 1914, Ms. Ovington explained the choice this way:
[I]f we had a creed to which our members, black and white, our Branches, North and South and East and West, our college societies, our children’s circle, should all subscribe, it should be the lines of Lowell’s noble verse, lines that are as true today as when they were written seventy years ago. [Mary White Ovington, “How the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People Began,” The Crisis (August, 1814)]
Ninety-one years after Ms. Ovington’s wrote that, Lowell’s lines speak to us still:
Once to every man and nation,
Comes the moment to decide,
In the strife of truth and falsehood,
For the good or evil side.
Some great cause, God’s new Messiah,
Offering each the bloom or blight,
And the choice goes by forever,
Twixt that darkness and that light.
As one who found a “great cause,” I hope all of you do too. “The moment to decide” came for me on or about February 4, 1960.
I was sitting in a café near my college campus in Atlanta, Georgia, a place where students went between – or instead of – classes.
I was approached by a student named Lonnie King – no relation to Martin Luther King, Jr. – whom I knew as a football player on our school’s losing team, and a Navy veteran, some years older than our classmates. He held up a copy of that day’s Atlanta Daily World, Atlanta’s black newspaper, and indicated a headline: “Greensboro Students Sit-in for Third Day.”
The story told, in exact detail, how black college students from North Carolina A & T University in Greensboro, for the third day in a row, had entered a Woolworth’s Department Store and asked for service at the white-only lunch counter. It described their demeanor, their dress, and their determination to return the following day – and as many successive days as it took – if they were not served.
“Have you seen this?” he demanded.
“Yes I have,” I replied.
“What do you think about it?” he inquired.
“I think it’s great!”
“Don’t you think it ought to happen here?” he asked.
“Oh, I’m sure it will happen here,” I responded. “Surely some one here will do it.”
Then, to me, as it came to others in those early days in 1960, a query, an invitation, a command. “Why don’t we make it happen here?”
He took one side of the café and I took the other, talking to students, inviting them to discuss the Greensboro news and to duplicate it in Atlanta. The Atlanta student movement had begun.
We joined a vast army of nonviolent protestors who rose up to challenge segregation’s morality, after the Supreme Court had ended its legality.
Young people, like you, began embracing jail without bail when they sat down to stand up for their rights. They attacked segregated interstate travel with their bodies and segregated ballot boxes across the South as well.
From the first it was a people’s movement, made up of ordinary women and men. The cumulative acts of their passive resistance became our modern democracy’s finest hour. By 1965, Jim Crow was legally dead.
A voteless people had voted with their bodies and their feet and had paved the way for other social protest. The anti-war movement of the 1960s drew its earliest soldiers from the southern freedom army. The reborn movement for women’s rights took many of its cues and much of its momentum from the southern movement for civil rights.
Most of those who made the movement were not famous; they were faceless. They were not notable; they were nameless – marchers with tired feet, protestors beaten back by fire hoses and billy clubs, unknown women and men who risked job and home and life.
As we will honor you graduates tomorrow for what you have achieved, so should you honor them for what they achieved for you.
They helped you learn how to be free.
They gave you the freedom to enter the larger world protected from its worst abuses.
If you are black or female, their struggles prevent your race or gender from being the arbitrary handicap today it was then.
If you belong to an ethnic minority or if you are disabled, your ethnicity or disability cannot be used to discriminate against you now as it was then.
If you are Christian or Jewish or Muslim, your faith cannot be an impediment to your success. As you grow older, because of what they did then, you will be able to work as long as you are able. Your job – your responsibility – is to make these protections more secure, to expand then for your generation and for those who will soon follow you.
Our future as a nation depends on our willingness to reach into the racial cleavage that defines American society and change the racial contours of our world.
In 1954, the federal government’s brief in the Brown case argued that school desegregation was a Cold War imperative, a necessary weapon to win America’s battles overseas. Current events give us the same imperative today- to prove to friend and foe alike that our commitment to justice is real.
Wherever you may go from here, if there are hungry minds or hungry bodies nearby, you can feed them. If there are precincts of the powerless poor nearby, you can organize them. If there is racial or ethnic injustice, you can attack and destroy it.
The choice is yours.
Not every choice you make will be momentous. But in order to be ready for the momentous, you need to be guided by moral principles in the mundane.
Don’t let the din of the dollar deafen you to the quiet desperation of the dispossessed. Don’t let the glare of greed blind you to the many in need.
You must place interest in principle above interest on principal.
An early attempt at ending illiteracy in the South developed a slogan – “Each One Teach One” until all could read.
Perhaps your slogan could be “Each One Reach One.”
Each One Reach One until all are registered and voting.
Each One Reach One until all are productive citizens of our world
.Each One Reach One until the weak are strong and the sick are healed.
Each One Reach One until your problem is mine, until mine is yours.
You have the power to materially affect the lives and welfare of vast numbers of people in distressed communities – and thereby to improve the quality of life for us all and to make your world a more just place.
As you go forward, remember these final lines from James Russell Lowell’s poem:
Though the cause of evil prosper,
Yet ’tis truth alone is strong.
Though her portion be the scaffold,
And upon the throne be wrong.
Yet that scaffold sways the future,
And beyond the dim unknown
Stands God within the shadow,
Keeping watch above His own.
May He watch over you.
Baccalaureate Address
© 2005 by Julian Bond
Williams College Baccalaureate, June 4, 2005