NAACP Leader Says GOP ‘Hostile’ to Civil Rights

WASHINGTON —  Declaring that racism is alive and well in America, NAACP Chairman Julian Bond on Saturday accused the Republican leaders of Congress of being hostile to civil rights.

Despite advances since the end of segregation, racism is everywhere--especially in politics--the veteran activist said at the National Assn. for the Advancement of Colored People’s 90th annual meeting.

“As we meet, the leadership of the House and Senate is more hostile to civil rights than at any time in the recent past,” Bond told the largest and oldest U.S. civil rights organization.

“They have become the running dogs of the wacky radical right,” he added. The NAACP is holding its annual meeting in Washington for the first time.

Bond said new House Speaker J. Dennis Hastert (R-Ill.) supported a measure in the last Congress that would have eliminated federal equal opportunity programs.

He expressed disappointment in senators’ response to news last year that Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott had spoken to the Council of Conservative Citizens, a white extremist group in his home state of Mississippi, as recently as 1995, and hosted its leaders at his Capitol offices in 1997.

“To date, no member of the Senate, not one Democrat and not one Republican, has spoken out against this outrage,” Bond said.

Bond, who rose to national prominence during the civil rights campaigns of the 1960s and was among the founders of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, said that racism in America today “less often wears a hood and burns a cross.”

“Now it sometimes wears a three-piece suit, but behind that disguise there lurks an evil that our forefathers and mothers fought,” he said.

Also at the meeting, NAACP President Kweisi Mfume said the group is considering joining the growing number of cities filing lawsuits against gun makers.

“We represent a significant constituency that is disproportionately affected by gun violence. The time has come for us to look at the proliferation of handguns,” he said.

Mfume said he would present to the NAACP’s 64-member board several options, ranging from issuing a resolution to filing suit.