Julian Bond Quotes
Our ideas about race are contrasted with the standard that Thomas Jefferson set for us in writing the Declaration of Independence.
Julian Bond, 1940-1975, U. S. Congressman (Democrat, GA), Chairman, NAACP, PBS, Thomas Jefferson: A View From the Mountain, March 25, 1996
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The large majority of the American people opposed legal segregation and for years, the segregationist, racist, Southern white minority were able to prevent any Civil Rights legislation by using the filibuster until President Lyndon Johnson, formerly a Southern Senator who understood the legislative process better than any other American president used his great skill to pass Civil Rights legislation instead of opposing it which he had done for years as a Texas Senator and the Majority Leader of the Senate.
Essentially this quotation led to a major war and yhrn a later war of independence for Blacks in South Africa. Porter was the Attorney General of the English Cape Colony in South Africa. In an early legal ruling he observed that South Aftica was a colony under English law which did not permit discrimination on the basis of skin color. However, there was a large proportion of Afrikaners—whites of Dutch Ancestry who were culturally strong racists and saw the Blacks as a combination of potential rivals for land and a potential subjegated labor force. They tended to leave the Capetown area and English law. The Afrikaners ended up in a major war—the Boer War—against the English and although the English won the war, the Afrikaners won the political peace and ended up dominating South Africa and imposing apartheid. The Blacks of the mid 20th century had if nothing else, the 100 year old legal and moral precendent from Porter’s opinion which justified the ANC leading the attack on apartheid which finally succeeded. It took 100 years and millions of suffering and dying people but finally, the law of South Africa was as Porter had stated it, and since the Blacks were in the great majority, the Whites became the minority, but due to the ANC leadership of men like Nelson Mandella, the Blacks did not seek revenge on the Afrikaner whites although there was resentlent for generations.
The power structure of England and the English administrators of South Africa were strong advocates of racial equality at the beginning of the 19th century. They insisted on equal administration of law. However the Boer white population could think of nothing more absurd. In a sense the Boers were much like the Southern Whites at the same time. The South African government however could not enforce its equality policies in the rural area – the majority of South Africa at the time. When democracy and self rule came to South Africa, the racially moderating force of the English was minimized and the majority of South Africans wanted a racially segregated society. Apartheid resulted.
Bush, despite statements like this, polarized America on the race issue. Most of the racists and people who believed in segregation supported Bush, while few Blacks and liberals did.
Horace Julian Bond was an American social activist, leader of the civil rights movement, politician, professor, and writer. While he was a student at Morehouse College in Atlanta, Georgia, during the early 1960s, he helped establish the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). In 1971, he helped found the Southern Poverty Law Center in Montgomery, Alabama, and served as its first president for nearly a decade.
