Printer-friendly versionWhen 20-year old Julian Bond and 75 of his fellow students arrived for lunch in Atlanta's City Hall cafeteria on March 15, 1960, they knew they had come for more than a meal.
Five days earlier, Bond had co-authored a full-page advertisement in Atlanta's three daily papers. It listed grievances Black citizens had against the city and detailed the inadequacy of a system of separation most Whites probably thought equal. The ad announced the intention of Atlanta's Black college students "to use every legal and nonviolent means at [their] disposal" to change that system.
Bond, who became president of the NAACP last spring, takes a retrospective look at the link between civil and human rights.
The March 9, 1960, "Appeal For Human Rights" I co-authored represented both a high level of naiveté and an unusual degree of sophistication. Naiveté -- because many of us believed that merely stating wrongs would hasten making them right. Sophistication -- because we also thought in terms of more expansive "human rights" in lieu of the more limiting "civil rights." We felt confident enough of the justice of our position to appeal not just to our fellow Atlantans, but to the entire world. In the hindsight of 38 years, the combination of innocence and a level of finesse was probably essential to propelling 18- to 20-year-olds from the security of our campuses into the embrace of the city's jailers.
For us, then, human rights were key. These were rights universally recognized. We wrote that "every normal human being wants to walk the earth with dignity and abhors any and all proscriptions placed upon him [or her] because of race and color."
These rights, we insisted, were "already legally and morally ours." Those who denied us these rights were hurt, too. We said "segregation is robbing not only the segregated but the segregator of his [or her] human dignity." The connection between the denial of seats at lunch counters and on buses and larger issues of human rights seemed real to us. Perhaps because we lived the connection -- and the contradiction.
All of us had followed the beginning of the end of European colonialism with great interest. Many of our schoolmates were African youth from then-newly independent nations, who frequently boasted that while they governed their former colonies, we couldn't eat a hamburger in our college towns.
When it came time to place a name at the top of our statement, the choice was an easy one: "An Appeal For Human Rights." That's what we understood the civil rights movement to be.
