Julian Bond says GOP Trying to Reverse Civil Rights Gains

NAACP Chairman Julian Bond, speaking Friday, accused the Bush administration and the Republican Party of catering to "right wing" extremists and trying to reverse civil rights gains. Bond said the civil rights movement is facing some of its most significant challenges ever as affirmative action is under attack and judges raise questions on how laws should be enforced. He said civil rights activists need to be more vigilant. "Increasingly, nonwhite people are facing problems that are more difficult to fight than ever before," said Bond, chairman of the board of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, the nation's oldest civil rights organization. He was in Raleigh to speak at N.C. State University's 22nd Annual Brotherhood Celebration. Bond received the Benjamin E. Mays Memorial Award, which honors an African-American who has made contributions to the United States as a scholar and humanitarian. Bond noted that he had first come to Raleigh in 1960 with other college students to found the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, a key civil rights organization that planned sit-ins in segregated businesses and conducted voter-registration drives throughout the South. Although gains have been made since the federal Civil Rights Act was passed in 1964, Bond said dissatisfaction with the legislation helped the Republican Party gain a foothold in the South. He noted that the Republicans won all the states of the old Confederacy in last month's presidential election. Bond said Republicans have reached out to "Talibanistic" elements whose idea of civil rights is being able to fly the Confederate flag beside the U.S. flag. Black Southerners, Bond said, are just as disenfranchised as in the past because all of the South's electoral votes went to Bush. [more