Julian Bond.

There's a genial detachment to Julian Bond, fifty-eight, the newly elected chairman of the board of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), as he sits down for a Progressive interview at his Washington home on a recent summer's afternoon.

He is pleasant, polite, but guarded. Getting past his public mask can be a frustrating experience. One thinks of what Mary King, his former colleague from the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), wrote of Bond in her 1987 memoir, Freedom Song:

"He was also maddeningly self-contained .... Sometimes, I dreamed about Julian with ill-concealed distress over my inability to know him deeply. A key broke off in my hand in one of my dreams and in another I was searching for him, but unable to find him....I spent most of my waking hours with Julian and had so much respect for him, and there remained large areas about him that I could not penetrate."

This living enigma is a man whose personal history is intertwined with that of the modern movement for African American civil rights. The son of a distinguished educator, Dr. Horace Mann Bond, he was an early participant in the sit-ins and a founder of SNCC.

In 1965, in the wake of the Voting Rights Act's passage, Julian Bond borrowed $500 from SNCC for qualifying fees and stood for a Georgia state assembly slot from a black district in downtown Atlanta. Bond won that election--but Georgia legislators twice refused to seat him because of his opposition to the then-escalating war in Vietnam. Three years later, at twenty-eight, he became the first African American and the youngest person ever to have his name placed in nomination for Vice President at a Democratic Party convention.

For almost twenty years, he served in the state legislature. Then, in 1986, he decided to make a try for a Congressional seat that had opened up in the Atlanta area. His opponent in the Democratic Party primary was his old colleague from SNCC, John Lewis. It was a hard-fought, extremely bitter campaign-which saw Lewis raising "character issues" and demanding, among other things, that Bond sit for a drug test. Lewis carried the vote.

Bond hasn't slowed down a bit. He has been making a living as a writer/teacher/television host. It is his voice that narrates the 1987 public-television series on the civil-rights movement, Eyes on the Prize. Bond also appears weekly on the syndicated television show America's Black Forum. Still, he finds time to teach civil-rights history at the University of Virginia and American University.

Q: Much of the coverage of your election to the chairmanship of the NAACP board has been of the tone, "Ah, Julian Bond, the NAACP has saved him from obscurity." How do you react to this take on your life story?

Julian Bond: Annoyed. Ever since I've become chairman, there have been profiles of me in People, George, The Washington Post, The Detroit News, and all of them could have been written by the same person. They all make the same three points. One: that when I was young I had tremendous--but never realized--promise. Two: that after I lost the 1986 Congressional election, I vanished. And three: all of a sudden, the NAACP has rescued me from oblivion. Now, I don't think that's a true picture, and I kind of resent it.

Think about it: I was a Georgia state legislator for a great many years. I've appeared on a weekly syndicated television show since 1980. Over the last ten years, I've taught at Harvard-twice. I now teach at American University and the University of Virginia. That's not chicken feed! So I resent the idea that the NAACP came and picked me up, and here I am! I've been here all along.

Q: There's a theory about people of our political generation: We had such enormous impact when we were young that everything we did as adults seemed pale afterwards. In essence: We're a generation that peaked too early. Is that what these writers are saying about you?

Bond: I don't know. I do think that some of us began to realize that this was going to be a long struggle that was going to go on for decades, and you'd have to knuckle down. A lot of people in our generation did that. They didn't drop out and run away.

You know, we had a reunion in 1994 of the people who worked in Mississippi in 1964. Thirty years later, almost to a man and a woman, they were activist people, schoolteachers, educational activists. None of them is risking life anymore. But all of them are still fighting the good fight.

Q: Still, when you look at the civil-rights documentary that you narrated, Eyes on the Prize, the first section of it--the period before 1968--is very exciting ....

Bond: Yes, uplifting.

Q: And the second part of it--which concerns the years after 1968 when the generation began a kind of political diaspora--is incredibly depressing. I'm wondering if you, like "the Movement," went through a period of depression?

Bond: Not in the sense that I personally became depressed. I do think we came to a period when we realized, "Gee, this is going to take longer than we thought." And for most of us, that realization came fairly early--1961, 1962, 1963. I can remember the excitement about the early sit-ins and saying, "Boy, this is going to happen like that." And it did not happen. We quickly became aware that this was bigger than we thought and that we would have to dig deeper and do more. And we're still doing it today.

Q: You ran for an open seat in Congress in 1986 against your former SNCC colleague John Lewis. During the campaign, he charged you with, among other things, drug use. Were you shocked that an old buddy from the Movement would use such tactics against you?

Bond: It was beyond imagination, beyond imagination. But ambition does funny things to people.

Q: He really wanted it.

Bond: He wanted it so badly.

Q: Did it take long for you to forgive him?

Bond: Well, you know, I've not read his book [Walking With the Wind: A Memoir of the Movement], but I've had people read parts of it to me--and he says things about the campaign that I think are just not true. I think he's had trouble adjusting to winning the election.

Q: You'll have to explain that.

Bond: I think he's just having trouble with the fact that the election is over--he's proven to be the best man. But in the book he mischaracterizes me very badly, mischaracterizes the election. I've heard that he says that I got all the white vote when, in fact, the opposite is true. He got a minority of the black vote and all of the white votes. It was that black minority and white majority that was sufficient to carry the day. But I've been told he describes it in the opposite terms. Now, I feel funny commenting on something I haven't read myself, but from what I have been told, he had these feelings of resentment against me that went back far before the campaign started.

Q: In David Halberstam's new book on the sit-in pioneers, The Children, he writes of the insecurities that contrasted some of the poorer Nashville-based student-activists with those who came from wealthier Atlanta families. The Nashville students, of whom John Lewis was one, were often from rural communities and terribly poor. You hailed from a family of prominent educators, from the African American elite. Do you think that perhaps a kind of class resentment is at the root of the conflict?

Bond: It could be. You know, I come from six generations of college graduates. He's the first person in his family to go to college. But I think the movement was a mix of who was black and young and who was in college then. We came from a variety of backgrounds. [Lewis's insecurity] was something I was not aware of until we clashed in the campaign--and then, I could not put a name on it like, "insecurity." I couldn't understand it. I can't explain other people's insecurities. I have my own. And my fears. I like to think I have them under control.

Q: OK, that election is water under the bridge. About your new post as chair of the NAACP, many people have wondered how such a venerable mainstay of the civil-rights community could be the center of so many scandals in recent years. The NAACP had always been the backbone of the struggle for civil rights and all of a sudden, we were reading of leaders misusing funds, of sexual-harassment suits, of really crazy stuff.

Bond: One reason is that we fell victim to ego fights, turf battles, on the board. Every organization goes through these. In our case, it just went to the extreme. A faction seized control of the organization and used it for self-aggrandizement, to go on trips, to stay at certain hotels, to hobnob with movie stars--to live life large. And they forgot the mission of the organization.

Q: But wasn't there also a problem with the former NAACP executive director allegedly paying off some kind of sexual-harassment claim with the organization's money?

Bond: I had enormous hopes for Ben Chavis. This guy had one foot in yesterday's Movement and one foot in tomorrow's. He made a big deal about environmental racism, and I thought he was wonderful. I thought he was going to take us someplace. He didn't. He embarrassed us. He embroiled us in scandal and debt. We had to let him go. But even at the height of these scandals, even at the time when our finances were at their worst, the NAACP branches--the grassroots--kept plugging away. They kept doing what they do, and they do it well.

Q: During the 1960s, civil-rights organizations like SNCC were rather contemptuous of the "bourgeois" old fogies in the NAACP. The organization was dismissed as hopelessly conservative, stuffy, old-hat. Do you think this attitude was a mistake?

Bond: That was never a right characterization. There's a professor at the University of Massachusetts, John Bracey, who's the editor of the NAACP papers on microfilm, and he says there were never enough doctors and dentists in black America for them to have run the NAACP. It was always pipefitters, plumbers, farmers, ditch diggers.

But we had this characterization in our minds. In the cities, quite often, that's who we saw. The president of the branch in Atlanta was a pastor of a church, the Reverend Sam Williams, a wonderful guy. He was middle-class and fairly militant for the time and place. But the institution and its politics just seemed so out of touch to us. They opposed the sit-ins. They didn't like direct action. They didn't like civil disobedience. They believed in law and litigation. And we were tired of that. We didn't want that. It took too long.

We respected their grassroots, though. In Alabama, Mississippi, and Georgia, it was the NAACP people we were working with. What we didn't respect was the bureaucracy and hierarchy because it was slow and cumbersome and bureaucratic and didn't do anything.

And to a certain extent, that's still true. Part of my task is to modernize the institution and to hasten a kind of quickness, instead of this ponderous way we have of dealing with things.

Q: Give us the details of your "modernization" plans.

Bond: I've tried to make the board a quicker-acting, more efficient entity. And I've tried to stop the board from micromanaging the organization. Kweisi Mfume [president and CEO] runs the NAACP. That's not my job. He hires and fires staff. I don't want board members calling up the staff and saying, "Do this, do that." I've tried to stop that from happening.

And I've tried to give us a higher profile. Typically, at a board meeting, we'd pass resolutions about the civil-rights issue of the day, but we'd never tell anyone. So I've instituted a policy of announcing our resolutions at the end of our meetings. So now, no longer will people say, "What do you do? What are you for? What are you against?"

Programmatically, we want to beef up our legal staff. Five years ago, we owed $4 million, and we had to lay off our staff. We have begun to build the staff up again and Mr. Mfume has just announced an employment-discrimination litigation project that will hopefully bring on a couple of new lawyers.

I want to step up our voter-registration activities. Not every branch does it, and not all the time. I want them to go back and get out the vote because I want us to have a big impact on the Congressional elections this year.

Q: So it's back to basics for the NAACP?

Bond: Absolutely. We're going to do the old things better. I don't think there are new ways [to create social change]. There are only so many ways, and they are organization, mobilization, litigation, coalition. Not new.

But we may have new targets. For example, last year, Mr. Mfume put together a coalition and targeted the leisure industry on employment, vendors' contracts, that kind of thing. Next, he is targeting the telecommunications industry--and two years in the future, banking and finance. Again, this is not new. What is new is that he has assembled this large array of organizations, with us as the lead, and we can say, "We don't just speak for the NAACP, but for black sororities and fraternities, the Masons, the Elks, and we want to know what are you doing about employment, contract, and vendor practices?"

Q: Recently, Jesse Jackson's been hinting that he may make another run at the Presidency. Should he?

Bond: I wish him well. He's the single figure in the country who consistently links race and economics. No one does it as well, or as frequently, as he. So I'm glad to have his voice out there. And I wish it were heard more often, and more loudly. But as to whether he should run for President, that's up to him.

Q: There are pundits who think that he's in danger of making a caricature of himself by running once too often.

Bond: I think he inevitably will be made a caricature of, and part of that has nothing to do with Jesse Jackson. What is the nature of journalism today? It's the temper of the times for journalists to poke fun at things. So that's going to happen to Jackson if he runs again. It doesn't have anything to do with him.

Q: But there is this perception of him as someone who just loves to run.

Bond: Yes, and he did so well last time. He didn't win the big magillah, but he won Michigan, where people didn't expect him to. And he did well almost everywhere. Who's to say he can't do better?

Q: Has Clinton broken your heart?

Bond: I didn't have that much invested in him. I was very taken with him as Candidate Clinton the first time around, and I've been disappointed with much that he's done: Lani Guinier, welfare reform, this, that, and the other thing.

But to his credit, I think he's the first President since Lyndon Johnson who understood race and is willing to risk something on it. His defense of affirmative action was something he did not have to do. So he didn't break my heart, but he doesn't have me dancing in the streets, either,

Q: When you look at his "dialogue on race," what do you see?

Bond: I see an effort that has apparently engendered an enormous amount of local activity and dialogue. I'm a big believer in dialogue--though dialogue alone is not sufficient. After talk, there's got to be action.

Q: It seems more like Clinton is buying himself some civil-rights credits on the cheap.

Bond: Yes, I think there's a big element of that. But I also think that we read into it. And perhaps the President has caused us to. He's good at that. He caused us to read more into it than he'd put in, to think that it was going to do more, pronounce more, suggest more, than it actually will. And I think that we're going to be disappointed, and we're going to say, "Is this all it is?" And he's going to say, "That's all it was ever going to be." And some of us will say, "Well, you got us again."

Q: On another subject, there's been a lot of calls lately for reopening the investigation into the assassination of Dr. Martin Luther King. What's your take on this?

Bond: The man who killed Dr. King died a few months ago. He bought the rifle, his fingerprints are on it, he was seen running from the building, he confessed to the crime. He had the means, motive, opportunity, and while I'm sure there were others involved with him, we know who killed Martin Luther King. His name was James Earl Ray.

Q: Why, then, do you think the King family has been asking for this reinvestigation?

Bond: Because we all don't want to believe that a nothing, nobody, little penny-ante, dime-store, gas-station stick-up thief like James Earl Ray could kill this marvelous, marvelous man.

Q: What's your long-term goal for the NAACP?

Bond: I want to try to help restore the NAACP to the luster it deserves. It's the biggest civil-rights organization in America, the major advocate for the rights of black people. I want it to do what it can to build coalitions. If other people don't share our history, they share our condition, and we can make common cause with them. I want us to be as big, bad, and bold as we can possibly be. And wherever race is talked about in the country--in the White House or at the corner barber shop--I want someone to say, "Here's what the NAACP thinks."

Q: One can't help but think of your organization as something like a gorgeous, neglected, old mansion in a downtown somewhere with all these beautiful carvings and important history....

Bond: And we're going to polish up the brass, and we're going to have people come to the mansion and say, "Boy, this is so pretty, but it's livable now, it's worthy of being occupied. Just because it's old, doesn't mean it's unusable. It's utilitarian. We can occupy it now. It's still good."