by Christopher Parker, UW assistant professor of political science
Last week, the Chairman of the NAACP, Julian Bond, was on campus. He was here to discuss Dr. Martin Luther King’s legacy: where do we go from here? A founding member of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC),Bond served as its communications director from 1961 to 1966. SNCC, as the student-based arm of the civil rights movement, was instrumental to the success of desegregation in the South, fashioning sit-ins and freedom rides to contest Jim Crow laws.
Later, through voter registration drives, SNCC helped black southerners gain access to the ballot. Bond was so committed to the movement, and his post at SNCC, that he took temporary leave from his studies at Morehouse College, where he majored in English, to devote more time to the freedom struggle.
Save for a select few who remain with us, with 48 years in the struggle and counting, there isn’t anyone more qualified comment on Dr. King’s legacy than Dr. Bond. He laments that the freedom struggle’s lost the “organizing tradition.” For him, it means engaging people, “going door-to-door…protesting, not just speech-making.” Having said that, he likes what he sees with Barack Obama’s campaign, the ways in which it’s inspired people—especially the young. Yet he wonders whether or not folks will remain engaged after the general election, especially if they don’t agree with the result.
In the final analysis, he seemed cautiously optimistic about what an Obama presidency would do for the country. From what I was able to glean, his words conveyed a sense that Obama has tapped into something, something unseen since the SNCC-sponsored events of 1964. Freedom Summer, an event designed to raise the consciousness of white student volunteers from non-southern states while teaching black southerners how to pass the “literacy exams” required for blacks to vote, brought blacks and whites together for a common cause: realizing the promise of American democracy. An Obama presidency, needless to say, offers the same allure, signaling that we, as a country, may have arrived.