Georgia Senator Speaks in Santa Ana : Julian Bond Urges Renewed Rights Push

Georgia state Sen. Julian Bond, in Orange County Friday night to speak at an observance of the birthday of Martin Luther King Jr., used the occasion to look back at the civil rights movement led by the slain civil rights leader and to chastise the Reagan Administration’s “constituency of the comfortable, the callous and the smug.”

Speaking to an audience of several hundred people at Santa Ana Valley High School, Bond also blasted the Ku Klux Klan as “people out of control,” and read a statement in support of a demonstration next week at the Westin South Coast Plaza Hotel, in Costa Mesa, that will protest an upcoming military conference.

Reading from a letter King wrote to white Southern clergymen while imprisoned in the Birmingham City Jail in the early 1960s, Bond told of the social differences prevalent between whites and blacks in the South two decades ago. “Understanding the past is what (today) is all about,” he said.

‘Great Alarm’

King’s “eloquent voice propelled him to a position of national leadership,” he said, adding that if King were alive today, he would undoubtedly view the “world about him with great alarm. Nevertheless, the world would be a different place had King not been killed.”

“History,” he said, “will record him as the premier feature in the struggle for freedom” fought by black Americans.

King was shot to death at a Memphis motel in 1968 during a campaign to aid striking garbage collectors.

Warning against looking back at “an imaginary golden age,” Bond told the largely black audience that the “magnitude and cruelty” of slavery in the Americas must also figure into the celebrations honoring the 56th anniversary of King’s birth on Jan. 15.

Studied Under King

Bond, who will be 44 the day before King’s birthday, first met the civil rights leader when he took a philosophy course under King at Atlanta’s Morehouse College in the late 1950s. The friendship between the two men grew during the civil rights movement of the 1960s, when Bond helped found and lead the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and King headed the Southern Christian Leadership Conference.

In 1965, at age 25, Bond was elected to the George House of Representatives, the first black to achieve that distinction since Reconstruction. Citing his strident criticism of the then-escalating conflict in Vietnam as a reason, the Legislature refused to seat him and continued to deny him a seat through two subsequent elections.

In December, 1966, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled unanimously that the Georgia Legislature had erred, and Bond was sworn in the following month.

Bond told Friday’s gathering that America must not be lulled into thinking everything is fine, despite “momentous gains” for blacks.

Today, he said, although black men and women are taking office and holding positions of power in “numbers undreamed of” a few years ago, America cannot ignore its growing infant mortality rate and must recognize the burgeoning number of families below the federally established poverty line.

“While our general condition had improved, our relative condition has actually managed to get worse,” he told the appreciative crowd.

The impetus of the civil rights movement, he said, found its strength in an aggressive black community that “found a sympathetic ear in the national body politic.”

‘Laissez Faire Benevolence’ But, he continued, “we black Americans began to believe that freedom, like the war in Vietnam, was just around the corner.” The greatest threat stemming from that misguided trust is a “laissez faire benevolence that dooms us to perpetual second-class citizenship,” he said.

The period since King’s assassination, he said, could best be dubbed “a tale of two decades.” Although he found cause to praise the “well-crafted” inaugural address of President John F. Kennedy in 1961, he also called it a “most dangerous speech,” one that “bristled with challenge” and helped define the moral agenda for the future.

The Kennedy years, Bond said, “produced the mind-set that gave us Vietnam,” but also gave birth to the Peace Corps. Bond then went on to lambaste the decade of the 1970s as one of “reaction and indulgence” during which the poor, the uneducated young and the relatively helpless elderly suffered the most. He also strongly criticized most of the presidents to hold office in the post-Kennedy years, including Ronald Reagan.

Reagan’s landslide victory last November, Bond said, “reinstalled the evil empire.” President Reagan, Bond said, “intends to eliminate affirmative action for minorities and women” and other gains achieved during the long, hard struggles and campaigns of the civil rights movement.

‘Clear and Present Danger’

“Those presently in power in Washington constitute a clear and present danger,” he said, with 3 million children “pushed off the lunch line” while the wealthiest 4% of Americans gained $35 billion in “after-tax income.”

The present Administration, he said, is also escalating the arms race and interfering in the internal affairs of neighbors in this hemisphere.

The sad thing is that “so many of us are aware and don’t care,” Bond said. He said that while membership in the National Assn. for the Advancement of Colored People has remained constant during the Reagan years, “the oldest terrorist organization in the United States, the Ku Klux Klan,” has grown in numbers by about 10,000 for each of those years.

He warned of “those who want to destroy (King’s) dream and replace it with a nightmare.”

Bond’s talk was preceded by a reading of King’s famous “I Have a Dream” speech delivered at the Lincoln Memorial during the March on Washington in 1963, one of the largest demonstrations in the nation’s history.

Bond is president emeritus of the Southern Poverty Law Center, and calls himself a vocal advocate of Klan Watch, an anti-Ku Klux Klan project directed from the law center. He is president of the Atlanta chapter of the NAACP, and holds a position on its national board.

He is also a founding member of the National Committee to Free Soviet Jewry and an active participant in the Atlanta Black-Jewish Coalition.