”Your Vote Is Your Weapon”: Honor Julian Bond’s Legacy By Protecting Voting Rights
The fight for voting rights was always a key cause for Julian Bond over his distinguished life.
In 1965, as communications director for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), Bond coordinated the group’s media response from Atlanta after SNCC Chairman John Lewis nearly died marching for voting rights on Bloody Sunday in Selma, Alabama. Bond made sure the country knew about the atrocities in Selma and finally did something about it.
Later that year, Bond won election to the Georgia House of Representatives, at twenty-five, illustrating the power of the new Voting Rights Act (VRA). After the legislature refused to seat him, for saying he agreed with a SNCC letter denouncing the Vietnam War, Bond appealed to the Supreme Court and won two more elections before the Court unanimously ruled that Bond deserved his seat.
He became one of the most well known politicians in America, but that didn’t stop Bond from continuing the painstaking, unglamorous work of democratizing the South. In the 1970s, he traveled extensively with Lewis on behalf of the Voter Education Project, registering black voters and encouraging them to run for office in forgotten places like Waterproof, Louisiana and Belzoni, Mississippi.
I wrote a lot about Bond’s work on voting rights and trips with Lewis in my new book Give Us the Ballot:
Their stops included civil rights battlegrounds like Belzoni, where fifteen years earlier George Lee, the first black to register in Humphreys County, was shot to death in his car after leading a group of blacks to register at the county courthouse. As Lewis and Bond spoke during an evening rally at a small black church, Belzoni’s mayor, Henry H. Gantz, a well-dressed middle-aged white man, unexpectedly burst through the door and walked down the center of the aisle. In the past, Gantz might’ve arrested everyone in the church for unlawful assembly. Instead, he clasped Bond and Lewis by the hand and told them: “Welcome to Belzoni. You two are doing wonderful work. You’re fighting bigotry and injustice. You’re a credit to your race.”
“He didn’t come down to the church to hear us speak,” an amused Bond said to the stunned crowd afterward. “He came down to be seen hearing us speak. He likes being mayor of Belzoni. He wants to go on being mayor of Belzoni. The reason he came to that church was that the black people have a weapon. It’s not a two-by-four; it’s not a gun or a brick. This weapon is the vote. You go down to the mayor’s office and hit him with a two-by-four, and he’ll remember it the next day. But if you hit him with the vote, he’ll remember it for the rest of his natural-born life.”
Bond and Lewis shockingly ran for Congress against each other during a special election for Atlanta’s 5th Congressional District—the hub of the city’s civil rights movement—in 1987. The fact that best friends competed for the same seat showed how few opportunities there were for black politicians in the South even decades after passage of the VRA. There were only two black members of Congress in the South at the time, “so it was this seat or none,” Bond told me. That began to change after Lewis’s upset victory, and there are twenty black members of Congress representing the South today.
Bond remained committed to the power of the vote when he became chairman of the NAACP, attending the signing ceremony where George W. Bush signed the VRA’s reauthorization in 2006. But seven years later, Bond watched in disbelief as the Supreme Court gutted the centerpiece of the VRA.
“This is a bad, bad day for civil rights,” Bond said. “There’s a proven record of discrimination in many states in this country. We can see during the last election these attempts at voter suppression nationwide in states both North and South. To imagine that this problem has been solved—or even more, to imagine that Congress, which is so dysfunctional, could deal with correcting this, is a myth.”
Chief Justice John Roberts “has done all he can do to frustrate the right of black people to vote, and it’s a sad commentary on him and on our judicial system that he’s allowed to do so,” Bond said during a speech at Dartmouth.
I asked Bond, for a 2013 profile of Lewis, if the attack on voting rights in states like Florida, Ohio and Wisconsin following the 2010 election surprised him. “I was naïve to think voting rights were untouchable,” Bond responded. “I didn’t dream that Republicans would be as bold and as racist as they are.”
On August 6, 2015, the 50th anniversary of the VRA, Bond urged the Congress to restore the landmark civil rights law. He tweeted, “Thanks to the Roberts Supreme Court and Congress we are celebrating the anniversary of the VRA without the VRA. Commit to its restoration!”
Protecting voting rights today would be a fitting way to honor Bond’s remarkable civil rights legacy.
By: Ari Berman, The Nation, August 17, 2015
“Julian Bond R.I.P.”: A Voice Of Unflagging Witness For Peace And Human Dignity
It’s always a shock when someone who is an eternal symbol of precocity dies, especially when it’s at a not entirely inappropriate age. To most Americans Julian Bond, who died on Saturday at 75, was a civil rights leader known for his wit and urbanity, and for long service to the great cause of his generation. To Georgians who remember the 1960s, he was the preeminent figure who united the civil rights and antiwar causes, and black and white progressives, and invariably made his enemies look foolish and small.
A quick personal anecdote: my best friend in high school had her purse stolen when we were in downtown Atlanta participating in an antiwar protest. What upset her most was not the loss of money or ID, but the Julian Bond autograph she carried around with her.
His national celebrity was attributable to two events: first, the refusal of the Georgia House of Representatives to seat him upon his election to the body in 1965, allegedly on grounds of his sympathetic comments about draft resisters. The Georgia House was forced to accept Bond by the U.S. Supreme Court in 1966, shortly before that chamber helped elect the ax-handle-wielding segregationist restauranteur Lester Maddox governor of the state.
But Bond’s second big national moment was even bigger: in the chaos of the 1968 Democratic National Convention, after he was seated as a delegate via a compromise with a slate chosen by Maddox, his name was placed into nomination for vice president by the McCarthy-supporting Wisconsin delegation.
During the vice presidential balloting won, of course, by the nominee Hubert Humprey’s choice Ed Muskie, Bond sheepishly withdrew his name on grounds that he was well short of the constitutional age for the office of 35.
Bond went on to serve for two decades in the Georgia legislature, which he left to pursue a seat in Congress in 1986. That led to the low point of his career, a bitter and unsuccessful campaign against his old SNCC colleague John Lewis. It’s likely that Lewis–who remains in the House nearly three decades after that campaign–was the only person who could have defeated Bond that year.
The two old friends soon reconciled, and Bond went on to become president of the NAACP for ten years. Throughout his later years, Bond became a familiar face on television talk shows, the college lecture circuit, and controversial topics. He was a very important figure in securing civil rights movement support for LGBT equality and marriage equality, and his final arrest at a protest occurred just over two years ago, when he joined a protest at the White House against the XL Keystone Pipeline.
We will miss his voice and his unflagging witness for peace and human dignity.
By: Ed Kilgore, Contributing Writer, Political Animal Blog, The Washington Monthly, August 17, 2015
“The Idiot Thug Running Maine”: Maine’s Ultra-Conservative Governor May Have Finally Messed With The Wrong People
Last week, members of the Maine legislature’s Government Oversight Committee unanimously called for an investigation into Tea Party Governor Paul LePage. At question is whether or not he inappropriately—and potentially illegally—abused his control over the state’s budget to force a charter school to fire a political opponent.
The “combative” governor, as The New York Times called him—which is New England shorthand for “asshole”—hasn’t so much protested his innocence as he has thumbed his nose at the bipartisan committee’s authority.
In a letter to Beth Ashcroft, the director of the oversight group, his counsel cited the legally-binding “You’re Not the Boss of Me” doctrine.
“The Governor and the exercise of his discretionary executive power are simply not subject to OPEGA’s jurisdiction and/or oversight,” the letter explained. “If members of the Legislature wish to ‘investigate’ the Governor, they should look to the Constitution for the authority to do so.”
They might do just that. Six state lawmakers recently said they would begin looking into the process of impeachment over the imbroglio, in which LePage has been accused of withholding more than $500,000 in state money from Good Will-Hinckley—which, sadly, isn’t a straight-to-DVD sequel, but rather a charter school for disadvantaged children.
LePage admits to demanding that the school sever ties with recently hired president Democratic House Speaker Mark Eves. Fearing the substantial and immediate loss of funds, the school promptly did just that. Eves, a long time political foe, has said he’s considering a lawsuit against the governor.
He might have to wait in line.
Joining the chorus calling for LePage’s sizable head on a buttery roll is the Portland Press Herald, who outlined other instances in which LePage has toed the line of propriety. This time, at long last, the paper’s editorial board argues, he’s gone too far.
“If this is allowed to stand, the governor could intervene in the legislative process at will by using the full power of the state to threaten the livelihood of anyone who doesn’t vote his way,” the state’s largest paper wrote.
For those unaccustomed to the darkened corners of the Maine political process, the larger question might not be what LePage is up to now, but how he ever got elected in the first place—let alone re-elected four years later in 2014. His rap sheet of bizarre, brazenly unilateral proclamations would be funny—if there weren’t, say, the futures of disadvantaged children at risk.
Actually, even if you ask state representatives, it’s still funny. Even Democratic Representative Pinny Beebe-Center—one of the lawmakers considering an impeachment investigation—admitted as much, telling the Bangor Daily News that LePage has given the state a bad name.
“We’re the laughingstock of the country,” she said of the man the right-wing politics site Politico called “America’s craziest governor.” “This is lower than low.”
As any lobsterman can tell you, the lowest depths are even deeper than you’d ever imagine, and if you trawl them long enough, you’re bound to dredge up something unsavory. For LePage that sort of thinking doesn’t seem to be just a metaphor, but an actual governing policy.
Back in 2011, LePage garnered headlines when he memorably told the NAACP that they could “kiss his butt” after saying he would not attend Martin Luther King Jr. Day events around the state.
“They are a special interest,” he said of the NAACP. “End of story. And I’m not going to be held hostage by special interests.”
LePage accused the group of playing the race card, then materialized an entire deck of his own, and kicked over the card table for good measure.
“And if they want, they can look at my family picture. My son happens to be black, so they can do whatever they’d like about it,” he said. The LePages took a Jamaican teen, who they did not formally adopt, into their home about ten years earlier.
Speaking of his children, critics of LePage called his hiring of his 22-year-old daughter to a $41,000 staff position shortly after he was elected “brazen nepotism” that would be “illegal in most states.” Then again, considering how he attempted to unsuccessfully make the legal working age 12 instead of 16, 22 is nearing retirement age.
Perhaps, you might be thinking, LePage is simply in favor of the concept of hard work? Only as long as it’s not organized labor. One of his earliest appearances on the national stage came when he demanded the removal of a mural dedicated to the history of the labor movement in the state, saying that it was disrespectful toward corporations.
And then there are the governor’s efforts to weaken environmental laws. LePage controversially overturned on a ban on bisphenol A in baby bottles, something that, at worst, the porcine governor cracked, might mean “some women may have little beards.”
Naturally, all of his farcical exploits have been dutifully documented by the state’s press, which has rankled LePage so much that he tried to order state employees not to talk to the Press Herald, an institution which he joked at one point he’d like to blow up.
Another instance of LePage’s infamous sense of humor came when he referred to a Democratic state legislator’s proclivity toward symbolically anally penetrating citizens without the courtesy of any lubrication.
As for his new-found concern for the well-being of Maine’s school children, LePage had some bracing advice for them a while back. “If you want a good education, go to an academy,” he said back in 2012. “If you want a good education, go to private schools. If you can’t afford it, tough luck—you can go to the public school.”
Unfortunately, if LePage gets his way, there might not be any money left to go toward those public schools, as seen in his most recent foray into the Austerity Bucket Challenge. LePage’s efforts to completely eliminate the state income tax, which generates around $1.7 billion in annual revenue, came to national attention earlier this year when he found himself in a pissing match with Maine’s most famous resident, Stephen King. The plan was defeated last month, but LePage has remained steadfast, saying he’s considering initiating a public referendum on the matter.
So how does such a spittle-lipped, gaffe-prone, “business-first” governor get elected in the traditionally mild-mannered state of Maine? It’s complicated, but it essentially comes down to two factors: Maine’s peculiar electoral voting system, and its polarized identity.
LePage’s election in 2010, which he won with just over 1 percent more votes than the next runner-up in a three-way race—and only 39 percent of of the total vote—was emblematic of just how little of a statewide mandate the governor ever really had.
Alex Steed is a columnist for the Bangor Daily News who wrote last week about how frustrated he’s become explaining what the deal is with LePage to people outside of Maine. He tells The Daily Beast that it’s confounding that LePage managed to pull off another slight victory in 2014 “despite having become known for telling the NAACP to kiss his butt and warning school children against the dangers of reading newspapers.”
“Those things actually happened,” he says.
Chris Korzen, a political activist and former head of the group Maine’s Majority, an organization dedicated to “highlighting the disconnect between LePage and Maine voters,” says LePage got elected for two reasons.
“Many if not most voters hunger for leaders who are strong and decisive, who don’t kowtow to outside interests, who aren’t afraid to tell it like is and be themselves. LePage is all of that,” he says.
“Secondly, the Democrats have utterly failed to communicate a coherent vision for Maine’s future, and have instead focused much of their time attacking the governor and cutting back-room deals. The bottom line is that Democrats have not given the people what they want—and LePage has. Whatever misgivings they may have about LePage are outweighed by the lack of a suitable alternative.”
Despite all of that, Steed says, Lepage found his way back in office in 2014 when voter turnout was high because of a referendum on, of all things, trapping bears.
“This was widely known as the ballot question about whether or not it was cool to bait bears with donuts and then trap them,” he said. “This rallied the outdoorsmen to come out to the ballot in huge numbers, particularly in Northern Maine, and while out, they voted for LePage, the most conservative candidate. This speaks generally to a complex and layered scenario, of course, but in short, he owes his second term, which he clearly perceives as a mandate even against his own party, to the lack of a runoff voting system, and trapping bears with donuts.”
That’s about as good of an explanation for the duality of Maine’s voting bloc as any. In short, there are two Maines: the place people around the country think of when they imagine it—the Vacation State of craggy shores and sea-side lobster shacks. And there’s the other Maine, basically the South of the North.
There’s the Maine you picture when you want to send someone a postcard from vacation, and the one that you picture when sending a ransom note from an abandoned hunting shed.
In other words, it’s a liberal’s worst nightmare. LePage’s frequent sparring partner, Stephen King— who addressed the latest controversy on Twitter recently—knows a thing or two about those.
“Paul LePage has become a terrible embarrassment to the state I live in and love,” he wrote. “If he won’t govern, he should resign.”
It’s not hard to imagine LePage inviting King and those who agree with him to direct their comments in the vicinity of the nearest toilet bowl. If only he weren’t dragging the rest of the state into it as well.
By: Luke O’Neil, The Daily Beast, July 6, 2016
“Money Can’t Always Buy Respectability”: Sterling Shielded His Racism With Wealth, Until People Finally Couldn’t Take It Anymore
Pat Buchanan had an interesting column about Donald Sterling and his long history of racism, often self-proclaimed. His point: follow the money.
For years, Sterling has been in court for discrimination and he has made racist comments on the record. He was fined nearly $3 million by the Justice Department for discriminating against blacks and Hispanics in his housing units. Yet, because of his vast wealth, people seemed to look the other way. The Los Angeles chapter of the NAACP was even about to give him a Lifetime Achievement Award.
I don’t often agree with Buchanan on such matters, but he had a point. Why do the Duck Dynasty boys continue to skirt any serious repercussions from racist comments? Why does A&E keep them on and others ignore the racism? Follow the money.
Big, wealthy franchise owners often don’t pay for their outrageous comments and actions. Take Donald Trump – his buffoonery knows no bounds. It really is only when wealth and power with good sense confront wealth and power with bad sense that we see change.
A friend sent me a review of the court case from 1970 when the Kenwood Country Club in Bethesda, Md., was forced to change its discrimination policies. I remember it because my old boss, Sen. Frank Church, along with others such as former Republican Sen. Robert Griffin, Federal Communications Commission Commissioner Nicholas Johnson and Rev. Richard Halverson (later Senate chaplain), filed a suit against Kenwood.
The tony neighborhood of Kenwood had a long history of covenants prohibiting sales of homes to anyone who was not “Caucasian” – no blacks, no Hispanics, no Asians, no Jews. Not only was membership denied in the Kenwood Club, but as a member you could not even bring a non-white guest to the club. Many were unaware of this until a women member wanted to have a Wellesley College lunch in 1968 and invited the then-Mayor Walter Washington as the speaker. No can do, said the club.
The result was the successful lawsuit and the resignation of members such as Secretary of State William Rogers, Secretary of Defense Melvin Laird, former Postmaster General Edward Day and the President of George Washington University, Lloyd Elliot. Wealth and power confronted wealth and power. But that was more than 40 years ago and maybe it is time that we don’t just ignore the slights and side comments and behavior of the Donald Sterling’s of the world, but rather stand up to those who think they are untouchable because of their bank accounts.
Many still believe they can buy respectability. Many believe they can accumulate great wealth and escape responsibility for their actions. It is a shame that we still have to follow the money, even if it finally was successful with Donald Sterling.
By: Peter Fenn, U. S. News and World Report, May 1, 2014
“The Rich, Still Different From You And Me”: We Still Treat Them As Though Their Feelings About Money Are Similar To Ours
When the news broke that Los Angeles Clippers owner and creepy racist misogynist billionaire Donald Sterling would be banned from the NBA for life (perhaps resulting in him selling the team) and fined $2.5 million, a lot of people probably said, “$2.5 million? The guy’s got a couple of billion dollars! Why not give him a fine that’ll hurt?”
Frankly, I think any fine at all is a little strange in this case. We usually think of fines as punishment for violations of some rule or law, not as a response to someone just being a horrible human being (though there could well be some clause in the the secret NBA owner bylaws about behavior that reflects poorly on the league). The ban, on the other hand, seems perfectly appropriate, even if when he sells the team he’ll net a few hundred million dollars on his original $12 million investment. But the fine—and the weird fact that he was about to get a “lifetime achievement award” from the NAACP for his contributions to the welfare of black people—remind us that although the super-rich have a fundamentally different relationship to money than the rest of us, we still treat them as though their feelings about money are similar to ours.
Here’s what I mean. Back in the day (and maybe still, I’m not sure), when the United Jewish Appeal was soliciting contributions, they used to tell people, “Give till it hurts.” The idea was that if your contributions hadn’t actually had an effect on your life that you could feel, you could still give a little more. But for someone like Sterling, it would be almost impossible to give till it hurts, whether it’s a contribution to the NAACP to get people off his back about those pesky discrimination lawsuits, or a fine from the NBA.
This reminded me of a memorial service I attended a few years ago with a few hundred other people for a billionaire who had just died. All the speakers discussed how moving and inspiring his generosity was, and he had indeed given away hundreds of millions of dollars to a variety of worthy causes. But all the encomiums to his extraordinary character as evidenced by his financial contributions had me shaking my head. He could have given away 99 percent of his fortune and still lived like a king. It wasn’t as though, when he signed a $10 million check, he said to himself, “Well, no going out to dinner this month.” He still had a bunch of homes, a staff to attend to his every need, and pretty much anything he wanted, even if he had parted with half his assets before he died.
To a billionaire, contributions that make people stagger with gratitude are meaningless, no different from tossing a quarter to a beggar. A billionaire who wanted to undertake a truly inspiring act of generosity would give away all but, say, $5 million of what they had. I don’t remember hearing of a single case in which someone did that. And as it happens, poor people actually donate a greater proportion of their income to charity on average than rich people do.
Of course, the NAACP wasn’t going to give Donald Sterling a lifetime achievement award because they were actually bowled over by his generosity and wanted his lifetime of service to inspire others, but because it’s good fundraising practice. When someone gives you a bunch of money, you have to flatter them, tell them how much you admire them, give them a handsome plaque. And lots of the super-rich are narcissistic or insecure enough that when they make a large contribution they want to see their names on the side of the building, so everyone knows how wonderful they are. Likewise, the NBA isn’t fining Sterling $2.5 million because that amount will make him reflect on what a jerk he is and lead to a change in his outlook on the common threads joining all of humanity, but because it sounds to the rest of us like a sizeable number, so they look like they’re serious about delivering a serious punishment. But Sterling won’t even feel it.
On the other hand, given that he is now one of the most (rightfully) hated men in America, he may have a slightly harder time finding women in their twenties who’ll agree to screw him if he buys them a car. Or at least we can hope.
By: Paul Waldman, Contributing Editor, The American Prospect, April 30, 2014
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