EVERETT — Civil rights leader Julian Bond asked a crowd of several hundred people to spend a minute to imagine with him.
Imagine, he said, a football game pitting whites against blacks. The whites own everything: the field, the uniforms, even the football. And they’re winning, 144-3.
Suddenly, a white player, feeling bad about things that happened before the game started, approached the black team, and asked one question: “Can’t we just play fair?”
The crowd chuckled sarcastically, guffawed, even gasped a little.
“‘Playing fair’ is double-speak for freezing the status quo in place,” said Bond, chairman of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.
He spoke Wednesday at the Edward D. Hansen Conference Center in honor of Martin Luther King Jr. Day, in a celebration sponsored by the county, Everett, and local YMCA and United Way.
An activist in the Civil Rights Movement since the 1960s, Bond, 68, was the first president of the Southern Poverty Law Center.
In addition to local politicians, speakers included Kim Henderson, winner of the 2008 Prodigies for Peace essay contest. The Mukilteo high school senior shared her thoughts on King’s legacy.
“Rosa Parks didn’t have King to sit down beside her on the bus,” she said, rarely glancing at her notes. “So we too can change, without King here.”
Henderson thanked the event’s organizers for allowing her to speak before Bond, a man who clearly appealed to the celebrity-conscious in the room.
He’s a civil rights leader, but he’s also no stranger in Hollywood.
Bond has narrated documentaries including “A Time for Justice,” a 1994 film that won an Academy Award, and had a role in 2004’s “Ray,” starring Jamie Foxx. He has also appeared on “Saturday Night Live.”
He’s accomplished, but he also knows the other side of fair.
His great-grandmother, a slave, was given away as a wedding gift to a man who took her as his mistress, Bond said. A child from that union was Bond’s grandfather.
Bond said his grandfather was part of a transcendent generation that experienced human slavery, and then freedom after the union’s Civil War victory.
“Only my father’s generation stands between Julian Bond and human bondage,” he said.
And Bond said he is part of a transcendent generation that has experienced segregation and freedom on the basis of the Civil Rights Act.
Yet there’s much more that must change, Bond said, adding that race remains a deciding factor in many social circumstances. Poverty doesn’t victimize poor whites like it victimizes poor blacks, he said.
“As long as race counts in America, we need to continue to count race,” he said.
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