Julian Bond - Controversial Comments

Controversial Comments

As NAACP chairman, Bond strongly criticized the Republican Party. WorldNetDaily, a conservative Internet-based news service, which inaccurately reported Bond as saying: " idea of equal rights is the American flag and the Confederate swastika flying side-by-side." WorldNetDaily accused him of calling Secretary of State Rice and former Secretary Powell "tokens" and comparing the judicial nominees of President George W. Bush to the Taliban. His actual words were that the Republican Party uses them "as kinds of human shields against any criticism of their record on civil rights." The issue was resolved when the Fayetteville Observer reported on its review of the audio recordings of the speech.

Bond was a strong critic of the Bush administration from its assumption of office in 2001, in large part because Bond believed the administration was illegitimate. Twice that year, first in February to the NAACP board and then in July at that organization's national convention, he attacked the administration for selecting Cabinet secretaries "from the Taliban wing of American politics". Bond specifically targeted Attorney General John Ashcroft, who had opposed affirmative action, and Interior Secretary Gale Norton, who defended the Confederacy in a 1996 speech on states' rights. The selection of these two individuals, Bond said, "...whose devotion to the Confederacy is nearly canine in its uncritical affection", "appeased the wretched appetites of the extreme right wing". Then-House Majority Leader Dick Armey responded to Bond's statement with a letter accusing NAACP leaders of "racial McCarthyism."

In 2003 Bond was quoted in a New York Times article criticizing the names of public schools named for Confederate leaders by saying, "If it had been up to Robert E. Lee, these kids wouldn't be going to school as they are today. They can't help but wonder about honoring a man who wanted to keep them in servitude."