As The Younger Leaders Of The 1960s Black Civil Rights Movement Pass- Julian Bond At 75-A Note

As The Younger Leaders Of The 1960s Black Civil Rights Movement Pass- Julian Bond At 75

 

 

 

 

From The Pen Of Frank Jackman

 

You know today if you know anything about the black liberation struggle here in America (and world-wide but the parameters of the racial issues are slightly different here and better known by me so let’s leave it as here in America) you know that over the past year or so the “torch has been passed” to the younger black militants, their allies, and those around the designation Black Lives Matter trying to organize against the brutal onslaught of deep-seeded racism in “post-racial” America. Organize against the unspoken by obvious oppression that black people face each and every day they wake up in this damn country that does nothing but provide military occupation of the ghettos, allows free-wielding cop harassment and death on the streets, provides no meaningful work, cares nothing of providing serious productive education, grants no hope except dope, authorizes no home except prison and those are just the little talking points. There is plenty more of psychological, sociological and economic devastation that could be gotten into, the beating down of the American fellaheen, the death of dignity.

 

But later on that. What I want to mention right now after hearing about the death at 75 of Julian Bond an early and prominent leader of the black civil rights movement in the South and of the anti-war movement when that became the issue of the day later in the decade of the 1960s is how irrelevant those “elder statesmen” from that movement which I was intimately involved with in my youth were/are to the struggles today. How the “Uncle Tom” designation that they put on the old time leadership back then came up and bit them as they “shilled” for the government when the do-nothing Democrats were in power and shilled even louder when they were not (do-nothing for the masses for them personally plenty). While everyone has to recognize the personal bravery of these old-timers back in the day when they took on the police state-like conditions of their times they are a deadweight on today’s struggles. It is no accident that guys like Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton among others are booed by today’s young black and white militants when they dare show their faces because they have abandoned whatever “better angels of their nature” it was that drove them to Doctor King’s door. The time except for a moment’s commemoration of names like King, Jackson, and Bond are over.

 

The “turn the other cheek,” the expecting of any serious help from the American government, even the notion that we are dealing with a rationale enemy on the question of race is passé. Those ideas died in Memphis in 1968, died in the battlefields of Vietnam too. So while I think back today to the sunnier days when Julian Bond was denied his seat in the Georgia legislature for his righteous opposition to the Vietnam War it is time to discard those old strategies that might have worked when the question was granting simple civil rights were at stake but are worthless when questions of life and death are on the table. RIP Julian Bond RIP.