Tensions among civil rights organizations
Bond discusses the controversy surrounding John Lewis's March on Washington speech. He interprets the older activists' censure of Lewis's speech as conservative attempts to avoid alienating the white liberal political establishment. The result of Lewis's speech hence reflected and illuminated the generational and organizational differences between older civil rights groups like the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and younger groups such as the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. While these differences widened the gap between activists, Bond argues that these differences made fundraising easier for the distinct groups.
Citing this Excerpt
Oral History Interview with Julian Bond, November 1 and 22, 1999. Interview R-0345. Southern Oral History Program Collection (#4007) in the Southern Oral History Program Collection, Southern Historical Collection, Wilson Library, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
Full Text of the Excerpt
- ELIZABETH GRITTER:
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Were you involved at all with drafting John Lewis's speech?
- JULIAN BOND:
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No, no, I didn't have anything to do with that.
- ELIZABETH GRITTER:
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What did you think of the controversy surrounding that speech?
- JULIAN BOND:
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Well, I really didn't know much about it at the time. James
Forman and Courtland Cox and Mr. [A. Philip] Randolph and Bayard Rustin
were really the principals involved in trying to get John to change his
speech. That took place up on the platform where the Lincoln statue
sits. So I was not involved in that at the time. When I found out about
it later, quite shortly later, it just seemed to be typical of the
desire of these older and more conservative civil rights organizations
to sugarcoat the messages that were being delivered from the platform.
We believed very strongly in what John was going to say even though I
had no part in drafting what he was going to say. We believed very
strongly in our position that the Kennedy civil rights bill was not
adequate, that it was weak and that the Democratic and Republican
parties were too much alike and neither one of them as strong for civil
rights as they should have been. We were fearful that the march would
turn into sort of a campaign rally for John F. Kennedy's
reelection and didn't want it to have that kind of political
overtone. So my afterthought was that this was just typical of the ways
these guys operated.
- ELIZABETH GRITTER:
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When I heard Mary King speak and I asked her a question about the
different civil rights organizations and different methods and the
interactions, she termed it "sibling rivalry." I was
wondering what you would have to say about that.
- JULIAN BOND:
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Yes, look at this way. Here are four or five organizations, very
different kinds of organizations and working in overlapping but
different ways. For example, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating
Committee believed in organizing people. That is if we could get
leadership in a community and people to follow that leadership to build
a movement, then we could go away and the movement would go on. Dr. King
and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference
believed in mobilizing people. That is to say marches, protests, and
demonstrations, and we did that too. But that wasn't our main
focus. Our main focus was trying to create something that would be in
the community for months and years to come, some kind of organization
because, quite obviously, fifty people together are stronger than one
person standing alone. So we wanted to get as many people as possible
involved. We were also profoundly democratic, with a small
"d". We believed in group decisions. We believed in
group organization. Our mentor was a woman named Ella Baker. Ella Baker
used to say, "Strong people don't need strong
leaders," because they themselves are strong. They
don't need somebody saying, "Follow me," or
"Do this" or something. So that put us at odds with
SCLC because they had the strong leader, Martin Luther King. Even though
we generally did whatever it was King said let's do. We
didn't like the idea of someone saying,
"Let's do this." We liked the idea of
everyone saying, "What about this? What about that? Why
don't we do this?" So anyway, here are all these
organizations with overlapping styles, a common, or nearly common,
agenda, but each one proud of its own identity because this identity is
tied to our fund-raising efforts. If we participate in a demonstration
and no one knows we're there, then we can't say,
"Look at what we did," because no one knows that we
did it. So my job, in part, and Mary's job was to make sure
people knew what we were doing. In many places we weren't in
actual competition with these groups, we were the only group. But we
didn't want people to say, "Negroes marched on City
Hall in Jackson, Mississippi." We wanted to say, "The
Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee organized a march of Negroes
on the City Hall in Jackson, Mississippi." So people in the
North with big checkbooks could say, "Oh, I like that. Let me
write a check." So part of it is a fight
for organizational identity. Again just on the surface, people say,
"Gee, why'd you have to do that? Couldn't
you all work together in common cause?" Well, we were working
together in common cause, but we were also fighting so we could say,
"We're doing this. These other people are doing
that. We don't think what they're doing is bad.
But we think what we're doing is good," and we want
people pay attention.