Julian Bond slams Bush, celebrates King

One of the legendary lions of the civil-rights movement roared onto the Rowan University campus yesterday and pounced on the record of the Bush administration. NAACP chairman Julian Bond, speaking to about 400 people at the Glassboro school's 19th annual Martin Luther King Jr. Scholarship Breakfast, accused the administration of appealing to the "dark underside of American society" and tampering with the basic freedoms granted by the Constitution. He said that while the administration was busy "writing a new constitution for Iraq, it is trying to rewrite the Constitution of the United States." Bond, 65, has been on the civil-rights stage for more than 40 years, helping to found the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee in 1960 and emerging nationally at the 1968 Democratic National Convention as cochairman of a group that unseated Georgia's segregated delegation. A politician, author, lecturer and television host, Bond has been chairman of the NAACP, the nation's oldest and largest civil-rights group, since 1998. To abundant applause and knowing nods, Bond excoriated the administration, in particular outgoing Attorney General John Ashcroft, for what he called reverting to a 1960s "J. Edgar Hoover approach" of spying on and lying about those who advocate progressive change in society. "There is indeed a right-wing conspiracy," Bond contended, "and it controls the White House, Congress, government, and most of the media." He said a double standard allowed the White House to consider affirmative action preferential treatment, but not the admission of someone to Yale University because his father went there. Both President Bush and his father attended Yale. Bond further argued that the Bush administration had used Secretary of State Colin L. Powell and Secretary-designate Condoleezza Rice as "shields" to protect it from allegations of racism. [more]