RIP Julian Bond, A Personal Hero

Saturday night, Julian Bond, one of my personal heroes, passed away. I didn't realize he was 75; I always assumed he was my age, maybe a year or two older. I first met him in 1966, and I'm going to tell you about that in a minute. In more recent years we've both been on the board of People for the American Way, where he has continued to inspire me. He's inspired a lot of people. In fact, this morning Eric Holder tweeted "Julian Bond-- activist, icon. A great man who made the gains of the next generation possible and the nation better. We owe him much."

From his days as the co-founder and communications director of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee in the 1960s to his chairmanship of the NAACP in the 21st century, Julian was a visionary and tireless champion for civil and human rights. He served as the SPLC's president from our founding in 1971 to 1979, and later as a member of its board of directors.

With Julian's passing, the country has lost one of its most passionate and eloquent voices for the cause of justice. He advocated not just for African Americans, but for every group, indeed every person subject to oppression and discrimination, because he recognized the common humanity in us all.

When I was a sophomore at the State University of New York at Stony Brook, I became chairman of the Student Activities Board. In that position, over the years, I brought groundbreaking, mostly then-unknown artists to play at the campus, musicians on the cutting edge of pop culture: Jimi Hendrix, The Doors, The Who, Joni Mitchell, The Dead, Otis Redding, the Airplane, Big Brother, Tim Buckley, Jackson Browne, Muddy Waters, Country Joe, Ravi Shankar, Pink Floyd, The Byrds... But there was also a speakers series I felt I could use to help expose students to a more overtly cutting edge. I was happy to invite Timothy Leary to speak at the campus. And then there was Julian Bond.

Julian Bond was one of 8 African Americans elected to the Georgia House of Representatives in the wake of passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Come January 1966, however, the Georgia House voted 184-12 not to seat him because he publicly opposed the war against Vietnam. The Supreme Court ruled unanimously that the Georgia House was depriving him of his freedom of speech and that they must seat him. They did, and I booked him to give a lecture at Stony Brook. Mrs. Couey, my lovely, batty old faculty adviser told me I couldn't present such an unbalanced program at a tax-funded university. I asked her if she wanted me to book the head of the KKK to balance it. "Now, Howie, you're so funny. You do the right thing." So I booked Senator Strom Thurmond as a speaker for the same evening. Balance!

A week before the event-- stoned out of my mind, as I was for my entire four years at Stony Brook-- I called Thurmond's office and explained that we're a struggling state university and the budget is tight and that I couldn't pay him the $5,000 I had offered and could he do it for $2,500? They said OK. I then called Julian and explained there was a change in plans and we would have to give him $7,500 instead of the agreed-upon $5,000. I felt I needed to do more.

The day of the event I picked Julian up at the airport in a fancy rented car and took him to the most exclusive restaurant in Suffolk County, the 3 Village Inn. We had an amazing dinner, and when we were leaving, we were approached in the parking lot by two waiters who said that although almost all the waiters were African Americans, this was the first time they had ever seen an African American eat there. They both had tears in their eyes.

Earlier I had asked my Hospitality Committee chairman to walk over to the Long Island Railroad Station and meet Thurmond. I gave him $10 and asked him to take the senator to a beer-and-pizza joint down the road from the campus for dinner. I knew Stephen would be very polite and charming to him-- it's in his nature. He was the most flamboyantly gay person I knew at the time.

Julian spoke, and the audience gave him a standing ovation. Then Senator Thurmond took the stage, and the entire audience-- as one and with no prompting-- got up and walked out of the gym. Mrs. Couey and Stephen, forever the most courteous and proper guy I had ever run across, stayed to hear Thurmond. No one ever told me what he talked about.

Julian served in the Georgia state legislature for two decades. Soon after he spoke at Stony Brook he was fighting on the floor of the Democratic convention in Chicago as the head of an alternative delegation trying to unseat the racists in the official delegation headed by Governor Lester Maddox, best known for having barred black students who wanted to eat at his segregated restaurant next to Georgia Tech with an ax handle-- and then for claiming LBJ and the communists put him out of business. The wave of the future. (The video at that link can't be embedded but I urge you to watch it.)

Sunday, President Obama issued this statement about Julian's passing: 

Julian Bond was a hero and, I’m privileged to say, a friend. Justice and equality was the mission that spanned his life-– from his leadership of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, to his founding role with the Southern Poverty Law Center, to his pioneering service in the Georgia legislature and his steady hand at the helm of the NAACP. Michelle and I have benefited from his example, his counsel, and his friendship-– and we offer our prayers and sympathies to his wife, Pamela, and his children. Julian Bond helped change this country for the better. And what better way to be remembered than that?

A few years before I met Julian, he wrote this poem (1960):

I too, hear America singing
But from where I stand
I can only hear Little Richard
And Fats Domino.
But sometimes
I hear Ray Charles
Drowning in his own tears
or Bird
Relaxing at Camarillo
Or Horace Silver doodling,
Then I don't mind standing
a little longer.

Jasiri X: "Keep Your Check"-- Gangstas Run The World On The Backs Of The Poor

Recently a Democratic strategist told some colleagues in the battle against the 1% that he felt badly about this but that times are tough and he has a family to support and that he might have to take a job working as a consultant for a Republican campaign. And that wasn't from some Inside-the-Beltway whore... it was a trusted progressive. Was.

We met Jasiri X a few weeks ago and listened to his song, "Occupy (We the 99)." A lot of people have been impressed by that powerful, compelling song-- including the students who bring the events to U-Conn. They hired him to play at a "Political Awareness Rally" on November 4. About a week before the event he got an email from the organizer, who, ironically I'd say, he met at Occupy Wall St. The e-mail stressed that "people" were concerned about his expected performance, particularly of "Occupy (We the 99)." This was all the more strange because the whole premise of the booking rested on the notion that institutions of higher learning welcome all types of ideas and that the event was, after all, a rally for political awareness. The organizer-- you know... a liberal type-- told Jasiri he would not-- would not censor him... but if he performed "Occupy (We the 99)," he might not get paid." No censorship there. It reminded me of when I was the one booking the events at my state-funded university in the turbulent mid-1960's-- University of New York, Stony Brook, just over the Long Island Sound from U-Conn. Let me go off on a tangent for a minute and we'll circle back to Jasiri's story right after, OK?

It's 1965 and I'm the freshman class president, just starting to understand the intersection between popular culture and political activism. Julian Bond was one of 8 African Americans elected to the Georgia House of Representatives after passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Come January 1966, however, and the Georgia House votes 184-12 not to seat him because he publicly opposed the War against Vietnam. The Supreme Court ruled unanimously that the Georgia House was depriving him of his freedom of speech and that they must seat him. They did and I booked him-- I was Chairman of the Student Activities Board by then-- to give a lecture at Stony Brook. Mrs. Couey, my lovely, batty old faculty advisor told me I couldn't present such an unbalanced program at a tax-funded university. I asked her if she wanted me to book the head of the KKK to balance it. "Now, Howie, you're so funny. You do the right thing." So I booked Senator Strom Thurmond as a speaker for the same evening. Balance!

A week before the event I called Thurmond's office and explained that we're a state university and the budget is tight and that I couldn't pay him the $5,000 I had offered and could he do it for $2,500. They said OK. I then called Bond and explained there was a change in plans and we would have to give him $7,500 instead of the agreed upon $5,000. I felt I needed to do more.

Strom & Julian Bond- balanced

The day of the event I picked Julian Bond up at the airport in a fancy rented car and took him to the most exclusive restaurant in Suffolk County. We had an amazing dinner and when we were leaving we were approached in the parking lot by two waiters who said that although almost all the waiters were African Americans this was the first time (1966 I think) an African American had ever eaten there. They both had tears in their eyes.

Earlier I had asked my hospitality committee chairman to walk over to the Long Island Railroad Station and meet Thurmond. I gave him $10 and asked him to take the Senator to a beer and pizza joint down the road from the campus for dinner. I knew Stephen would be very polite and charming to him-- it's in his nature. He was the most flamboyantly gay person I knew at the time.

Julian Bond spoke and the audience gave him a standing ovation. Then Senator Thurmond took the stage and the entire audience-- as one and with no prompting-- got up and walked out of the gym. Ms. Couey and Stephen, forever the most courteous and proper guy I had ever run across, stayed to hear Thurmond. No one ever told me what he talked about.

Last week Jasiri received another e-mail, from U-Conn, this one from the comptroller of the Undergraduate Student Government saying specifically he could not perform “Occupy (We the 99).”

Below is a video of the event. Before you watch it, though, here's what Jasiri told me about how he saw what this was all about:

I initially agreed to perform only a set of songs the University of Connecticut deemed “not political” because the event had already been advertised around campus and didn’t want to disappoint my fans by not showing up. I also didn’t want to let down the organizers who did a lot of hard work in putting the event together. But when I arrived at the University of Connecticut I had a change of heart. As I looked around the crowd I began to think of all the people around the world occupying for a better tomorrow, being arrested and brutalized by police, sleeping in the cold and rain, sacrificing comfort for freedom. I knew at that moment I had to perform the song, “Occupy (We the 99)” as well as other “political” songs like "Real Gangstas" (about the Wall St. bankers) [the video up top], even if it meant I would not get paid. At some point in this movement all of us are going to have to make sacrifices, if we truly want to see real change. The 1% control the 99% with promises of money, access, and comfort; we have to put our own souls above all three."

My life had just come full-circle! "You don't have enough money to tell me when I get behind a microphone what I can and cannot say-- especially in the hour when people need to hear this type of music.

Is Chuck Grassley Still Capable Of Working For The Good Of The Citizens Of Iowa?

Julian Bond has been fighting the good fight

for a long, long time

I first met Julian Bond in 1966 when I was in college and he had been elected to-- and denied seating in-- the Georgia state legislature. I blogged about meeting him a couple years ago; fun post about something I'm very proud of. In case all you know about Julian is his service as the chairman of the NAACP from 1998 until this year, he was around long before that. He helped found the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and was the first president of the Southern Poverty Law Center. And he served for 20 years in the Georgia state House and state Senate, although that all started kind of rough when the crackers who ran that show refused to seat him because they hated smart, uppity black people-- the same way Georgia racist Lynn Westmoreland hates President Obama half a century later-- and because he was opposed to the war against Vietnam. When I met him the Supreme Court had just ruled 9-0 (Bond vs Floyd) that the Georgia House of Representatives had denied him his freedom of speech and was required to seat him. He went on to organize the state legislature's Black Caucus, which wasn't very popular with the power structure there either. So what's all this got to do with Chuck Grassley? Julian did a spectacular OpEd in the Des Moines Register yesterday about Grassley's idiotic attack on the legacy of Thurgood Marshall.

Now that the Senate has formally approved Elena Kagan's nomination to the Supreme Court, one thing we know about her is that she clerked for and reveres Thurgood Marshall. That is because this became a major line of attack by Republican members of the Senate Judiciary Committee, chief among them Iowa's Sen. Charles Grassley, as they gauged her fitness as a potential justice. Many watchers were surprised by the attacks against Marshall by Grassley and his fellow Republican senators. I wasn't one of them. Appalled, yes; surprised, no.

Knowing that none of Marshall's 112 opinions from his time as a judge on the Second Circuit was overturned, Grassley nevertheless said Marshall's legal viewpoint "does not comport with the proper role of a judge or judicial method."

Kagan's work for Marshall, Grassley said, "indicates a liberal and seemingly outcome-based approach to your legal analysis."

Knowing that Marshall led the fight to dismantle the "separate but equal" doctrine in public education, Alabama Sen. Jeff Sessions, the top Republican on the committee, suggested Kagan was somehow wrong for esteeming him as her hero.

These attacks didn't surprise me because they're completely consistent with a party locked in the past, echoing the anti-civil rights message of those who opposed Justice Marshall's own confirmation in 1967.

Grassley, Sessions and their fellow Republicans roasted Solicitor General Kagan with the same attacks used against Marshall four decades earlier. Then, the late Sen. Sam Ervin of North Carolina complained about the likelihood that Marshall would be "a judicial activist," which he defined as someone "unable to exercise the self-restraint which is inherent in the judicial process when it is properly understood and applied, and who is willing to add to the Constitution things that are not in it and to subtract from the Constitution things which are in it."

When Ervin spoke of adding rights to the Constitution, there was no doubt that he was referring to the court's ruling in Brown v. Board of Education, which he had fervently opposed. Ervin went on to join with 10 other southern Senators in voting against Marshall's confirmation.

Now, in an effort to curry favor with an increasingly extreme base, personified by the likes of Sarah Palin, Republican senators flagrantly disparage a civil rights hero and the legacy of equality for which he fought. Although smears against Justice Marshall might have seemed out of place in the committee room, they fit right in among some of the GOP's most extreme supporters who wave posters portraying our president as a witch doctor and fling racial slurs. For that matter, they fit right in alongside attacks against last year's Supreme Court nominee, Sonia Sotomayor, who was herself accused of racism at the same time she was painted with ugly stereotypes about Latinos.

Grassley cannot participate in these subtle smears and at the same time claim to be representing all Iowans. Instead he, like others in the GOP, is making a calculated decision to pander to some while spitting on the values and history of others.

Blue America is very enthusiastic about the progressive Democrat running against Grassley, Roxanne Conlin. She joined us for a live blog session back in February at Crooks & Liars. When I asked her to tell me why Grassley voted against Elena Kagan's confirmation she seemed to indicate that Grassley had changed... and rather dramatically.

Senator Grassley’s vote against Elena Kagan is proof that Washington is broken, and any bipartisanship in the Senate is on the verge of extinction. Senator Grassley has chosen to vote against two talented, qualified women nominated to the Supreme Court, by a Democratic president, after decades of support for past nominations. This is an incredibly dangerous and disturbing precedent.  Voting on a Supreme Court nominee is a serious responsibility and Iowans deserve much better than childish, partisan games.

ROVE EXPECTS TO BE INDICTED BUT WILL HE GO TO PRISON? WILL HE BE COVERED BY RETROACTIVE IMMUNITY TOO?

Yesterday I introduced a post about Brent Bozell with an old school story of mine involving a lecture I booked at my school that featured Julian Bond and Strom Thurmond. I supposed I teased that it is a wonderful story and that I'd save it for a later day. Events a few days ago at the University of Iowa in Iowa City reminded me that may I should share the story (from around 40 years ago).

I booked Julian Bond, who was only allowed to take his seat in the Georgia legislature after the Supreme Court intervened, and my faculty advisor forced Dixiecrat Senator Strom Thurmond on me to "balance" the program. A week before the event I called Thurmond's office and explained that we're a state university and the budget is tight and that I couldn't pay him the $5,000 I had offered and could he do it for $2,500. They said OK. I then called Bond and explained there was a change in plans and we would have to give him $7,500 instead of the agreed upon $5,000.

The day of the event I picked Julian Bond up at the airport in a fancy rented car and took him to the most exclusive restaurant in Suffolk County. We had an amazing dinner and when we were leaving we were approached in the parking lot by two waiters who said that although almost all the waiters were African Americans this was the first time (1965 I think) an African American had ever eaten there. They both had tears in their eyes.

Earlier I had asked my hospitality committee chairman to walk over to the Long Island Railroad Station and meet Thurmond. I gave him $10 and asked him to take the Senator to a beer and pizza joint down the road from the campus for dinner. I knew Stephen would be very polite and charming to him-- it's in his nature. He was the most flamboyantly gay person I knew at the time.

Julian Bond spoke and the audience gave him a standing ovation. Then Senator Thurmond took the stage and the entire audience-- as one and with no prompting-- got up and walked out of the gym. Ms. Couey, my faculty advisor and Stephen, forever the most courteous guy I had ever run across, stayed to hear Thurmond. No one ever told me what he talked about.

Iowa City students were not happy this week when Karl Rove was invited to their campus-- and paid $40,000-- to speak.

Over 200 people joined in a pre-speech protest inside the South Room of the IMU. One activist dressed in a Rove mask and held a giant $40,000 check asking students to sign it so he could get paid. Other peacemakers dropped colorful banners off a parking garage across the street, some put on a hilarious anti-Rove puppet show, the Radical Cheerleaders performed for the people standing in line for the lecture, the School of Flyentology spun political dance records, and others chanted rhymes like:

We don't want Rove in our community

off the pig

Karl Rove stole our democracy

off the pig

he helped Bush take the presidency

off the pig.

But the real action happened after Rove's speech (he ducked every question thrown at him or retreated to ideological arguments that obfuscated the truth), when the reconnassiance wing of the UI Antiwar Committee received secret intel that the Lecture Committee was treating Rove to dinner and drinks at the bourgeois 126 restaurant.

Student surrounded the place, picketed it and challenged Rove with the use of a bullhorn. The police watched from a distance and didn't interfere with the protest. Eventually Rove slinked off into the night.

Think Progress covered the lecture itself, during which Rove said-- perhaps in jest, perhaps not-- that he fully expects to be indicted by the end of the year. Maybe that's a Republican plan so that Bush can pardon him before the new Administration takes over and tries to hold some of these criminals accountable.

During the lecture, Rove lashed out at hostile questioners, telling one man his comment showed “a simple, stupid mind” and chastised what he said were “stupid statements” from the audience. Rove also said that former Amb. Joseph Wilson “lied” about his 2002 trip to Niger and accused an audience member of “perpetuating libel” on the U.S. military for asking about the real number of deaths in the Iraq war.

...Responding to a question about CIA operative Valerie Plame Wilson’s outing, Rove, seemingly joking, added: "I haven’t been indicted yet, but I fully expect to be by the end of the year."

The University paid Rove $40,000 for the speech and had to agree to limit “recording equipment and flash photography” to “the first five minutes of the lecture.” At the end of the talk, an audience member shouted at Rove: “Can we have our $40,000 back?” Rove replied: “No, you can’t.”

Perhaps Rove needs to keep the $40,000 in expectation of substantial legal fees.