Speech to NAACP Convention
Freedom
Under Fire

BY JULIAN BOND
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Those who died on Sept. 11 were a diverse group. One of those who escaped from the World Trade Center said, “If you’d seen what it was like in that stairway, you’d be proud. There was no gender, no race, no religion. It was everyone helping each other.”

But back in America’s streets, there is gender. There is race. There is religion.

Since the attacks, people who look like Arabs or Muslims have been harassed, assaulted, even killed. On the Saturday following that terrible Tuesday, in Mesa, Ariz., a gunman shot to death a Sikh owner of a gas station, fired on a Lebanese clerk at work and an Afghan family at home.

Just as we know a lot about discrimination, we know a lot about terrorism, too. Slavery was terrorism. Segregation was terrorism. The bombing of four little girls in Birmingham was terrorism. And we know that the surest defense against terrorism is affirmation of America’s basic values.

We must understand that when wars are fought to save democracy, the first casualty is usually democracy itself.
The world we live in doesn’t need more weapons. The police and the intelligence agencies don’t need more powers; they need more professionalism. We are seeing freedom shrink and fear expand.

We have a president who owes his election more to a dynasty than to democracy. When he spoke to our convention in Baltimore in 2000, he promised to enforce the civil rights laws. We knew he was in the oil business. We just didn’t know it was snake oil.

And we have an attorney general who is a cross between J. Edgar Hoover and Jerry Falwell. We do not want to live in a country that permits surveillance of religious and political organizations. Yet the new FBI guidelines announced by “J. Edgar Ashcroft” do just that. We remember the counterintelligence program, called COINTELPRO. The FBI tried to disrupt the civil rights movement. They not only wanted him [Dr. Martin Luther King] discredited; they wanted him dead.

We thought we had put a stop to Hoover’s programs of spies and lies in the 1970s after these abuses were discovered. Now, under the guise of fighting terrorism, the FBI is going back to spying on law-abiding citizens.

They also want to return to the more recently discredited technique of racial profiling. American white men commit most domestic homegrown terrorism. Does the name Timothy McVey ring a bell? And why don’t we racially profile white male multi-millionaires like Kenny Lay or the executives of WorldCom and Tyco?

While the administration is busy asserting sweeping police powers over the American people, it is sweeping voting rights violations from 2000 under the rug. The margin of the Justice Department’s cynicism is surpassed only by their hostility to civil rights.

There is a vast right-wing conspiracy, and it’s operating out of the United States Department of Justice and the Office of the White House Counsel and the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights. There is an interlocking network of funders, groups and activists who coordinate their methods and their message. They are the money, the motivation and the movement behind attacks on justice everywhere.

Freedom isn’t free. It takes strategy, organization, mobilization, coalition and hard work. We have a lot of work to do.

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Julian Bond was a co-founder of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee in the early 1960s, and is currently chairman of the NAACP. This article is an excerpt from his speech at the NAACP’s national conference on July 7.