NAACP berates GOP on race

PHILADELPHIA — NAACP Chairman Julian Bond yesterday delivered a blistering speech against the Republican Party, accusing it of “playing the race card in election after election.”

“Apparently they think we really do all look alike,” Mr. Bond said during an opening address at the 95th annual convention of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. “To hear them, Martin Luther King and Clarence Thomas are the same man.”

The address, which in the last several years has been scathingly anti-Republican, has also become widely anticipated and celebrated by the majority of association members since Mr. Bond became chairman in 1998.

Mr. Bond’s statements fuel criticism from conservatives that the NAACP, despite its proclamations of nonpartisanship, has become a surrogate for the Democratic Party.

Yesterday, Mr. Bond, a former Democratic state legislator in Georgia, took jabs at radio host Rush Limbaugh and Vice President Dick Cheney, as well as at President Bush for the war in Iraq and the tax-cut plan he pushed through Congress.

He also repeated his claim made at the outset of last year’s convention that the Republican Party has “appealed to the dark underside of American culture, to that of minority Americans who reject democracy and equality.”

“If you’re a drug addict on the street, they say it’s a crime, but if you’re a right-wing radio talk-show host, they say it’s an illness,” Mr. Bond said. “Overdosed on testosterone, they’ve descended into the very vulgarity they say they want to keep off the airwaves.”

The tax cuts, Mr. Bond said, were put in place “to further enrich the already wealthy and to starve the government, making it unable to meet human needs.” The war in Iraq, “was not about weapons of destruction, but it was about the crass obstruction of the truth.”

He added, “If it was up to us, every man and woman stationed in Iraq would be safely at home right now.”

In the remarks, Mr. Bond urged people to vote in an election that “is a contest between two widely disparate views of who we are and what we believe.”

“One view wants to march us backward through history; wants to surrender control of government to special interests; wants to weaken democracy; wants to give religion veto power over science; wants to curtail civil liberties; and wants to destroy the environment,” he said. “The other view promises expanded democracy and giving the people, not plutocrats, control over their government.”

When Mr. Bush spoke in Topeka, Kan., two months ago to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the Brown v. Board of Education Supreme Court ruling that ended segregation of public schools, Mr. Bond said he was afraid to listen.

“[I was] afraid that he was going to announce that he was going to repeal the 14th Amendment,” which ensures U.S. citizens equal protection under the law.

Yesterday, Mr. Bond continued to criticize the president for refusing to address the conference for the fourth year in a row.

“No doubt he thinks he’ll take care of colored people by speaking to our sister organization, the National Urban League,” he said.

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