Narrative Assignment: Julian Bond Speech

Narrative Assignment – Julian Bond Speech

When I entered the hall where the famous civil rights leader was going to speak, the crowd filing in reminded me more of a church congregation than of a university campus audience. The general mood had an air of formality about it and many people were dressed up for the occasion. Conversations were going on around me but in quiet, almost respectful tones as everyone located their seats. The surroundings at Smith Memorial Hall helped to set this formal mood, too, because the hall could be mistaken for a church with organ pipes in the background and flower arrangements set up on the podium. Unfortunately, any expectations that I had about Julian Bond giving a high-powered, energetic

How did if feel for him to have been at the mercy of such totally ignorant, violent, racists. Bond must have been filled with horror and revulsion at the way these people treated blacks, and I’m sure that he must have felt like he had entered some kind of an alien, uncivilized territory of savages. These ancestors of these southerners had owned his own grandparents as slaves and in his mind, I’m sure he was convinced they were stuck at some kind of roadblock on the evolutionary scale. It struck me over and over again as his speech went on at how shameful it was for someone as knowledgeable and educated as Julian Bond is to have been forced to use a colored drinking fountain or refused service at a restaurant because of his skin color. However, I was impressed with the fact that he didn’t express any bitterness or hatred for the whites who treated him so badly. It must have taken all of his willpower to brush off their ignorance and viciousness like dust from his tailored suit and walked off with his dignity in tact. It was then that I began to think of him as a modern day hero instead of just a speaker that I had to listen to for class

I sensed that it must have been somewhat depressing for someone like Bond to have sacrificed so much for the movement for so many years to acknowledge that the goal still hasn’t been reached. It would have been so much easier for a person with his intelligence and potential to just give up, lead a normal life with a high-salary job, and let somebody else do the dirty work. But if he, and other civil rights leaders, had given up, some audience members in that very hall would never have been able to attend this university or even sit next to whites in an auditorium like they did that