BOND: We won it in the sense that we eliminated legal segregation in America. That is no more; that is finished. If you look at the young people I teach and compare them with myself at that age, their lives are so much richer and fuller. Opportunity is so much greater they can do things that I couldn't imagine doing. So in that sense sure, this was an enormous victory. We vanquished in the space of about five years a system that had been in place for almost 100 years. We confused discrimination and racism. We confused the poverty caused by discrimination with poverty caused by larger structural flaws in the economy. We have yet been able to come up with a strategy to deal with them. So we won, but we haven't won.

GATES: How would the world be different if you had been successful?

BOND: I think you would see many more black people scattered throughout the economy. Not just at the top. Not just this bulging middle class we've got now. But in blue collar jobs you would see a much fairer distribution of black Americans up and down the economic ladder rather than being bunched in this big poverty group at the bottom and this big middle class in the middle and this tiny upper class at the top. Our position would more nearly mirror the position of the larger society, and had we been successful, the larger society would also have changed a bit.

GATES: Since the day Dr. King was assassinated in 1968, the black middle class has roughly tripled - doubling in the Reagan era alone. Nevertheless, 45 percent of all black children live at or beneath the poverty line-- No model predicted that?

BOND: A couple of things happened. First, this middle class I think owes its existence to both affirmative action and the expansion of opportunity for people with skills and training. And so the number of not just doctors and lawyers and stockbrokers but black bank tellers, black policemen, black electricians just ballooned in this period particularly in the Reagan years. As doors opened and people with skills and training and drive walked in.

Secondly, the economy began to shift. As skills and energy became more of a demand, people who didn't have skills just got left behind, got shuttled to the side. Education didn't keep up with their promise. Education didn't prepare them for this new world. Jobs went overseas. Organized labor, which had been an enormous boost for black workers or black union members make more money than blacks who are not in unions, began to weaken. Things just changed. The movement couldn't develop a strategy to deal with it and couldn't find allies of the larger society to help shape those strategies.

GATES: Why not? We were very clever in analyzing race and racism for a couple of centuries....

BOND: Because we had studied it for a couple of centuries. We had been confronted by it for a couple of centuries. We knew it for a couple of centuries, but we didn't know this. For one reason or another just weren't able to come to grips with it. But then I don't think the American liberal community has been able to come to grips with it either.

GATES: Are we better off today than we were in 1967?

BOND: I'm not sure. I think so. I think there is probably greater racial tolerance nationwide now than in '67. These disruptions we see over the Simpson verdict are simply telling us that these divisions still exist. Simpson doesn't create these divisions. Those divisions are there and the fact that we know them now. That we see newspaper analysis of them. That we hear television commentators talking about them I think is a sign of progress not of regression. So in that sense sure, we are much better off, but we are not where we should have been if we followed the progress say from '60 forward. From '60 forward to the mid-60s we are doing well. Then we come to these bumps and slowness and almost frozen in place.

GATES: Is it fair to say that there are two nations within the African American community today? The have and the have nots?

BOND: Oh, yes, it is absolutely. When I was a kid, I grew up in the circumstance where my near neighbors were poverty stricken people and even when I was in my 20's living in Atlanta, my near neighbors were people on welfare. That's not true anymore. I don't live in a neighborhood with anyone except people like me. People who are poor who are living on the edge of poverty or who are living under poverty are tucked away some place else. I don't see them; they don't see me; we don't interact; we have no relation one to the other; no physical relation.

GATES: No, you have the symbolic cultural relation in that where you wear your kente cloth of a bow tie and cummerbund with your tuxedo and have your obligatory Coltrane poster on your wall and listen to black music or celebrate black culture. But that's not the same as being a member of the community.

BOND: No, it's not at all. We are the same here, but we are not the same in any other way. We are physically separated from each other in a way we never were before.

GATES: Yet we still vote when we vote. We tend to vote overwhelmingly for liberal left candidates --democratic presidential candidate, etc. It seems to me that it is very difficult to imagine how to connect these two strands of the black community together again.

BOND: It is difficult, and of course there are all kinds of ways in which it is being done. There are these mentoring programs, and the fall-out from Million Man March suggests that many, many more black man are engaging people in the poverty population. Mentorship boys programs, all those kinds of things. That's all to the better but something beyond that is needed. You can't just make these weekend visits to the ghetto and feel you have somehow closed the gap, which I think is getting wider and wider not closer and closer.

GATES: If you had the power, all the money in the world to solve the problem, how can we solve it? And define the problem....

BOND: The problem is the inability of the economy to absorb this large population at the bottom and that population's distance from the economy because of lack of skill and training and any kind of job experience. So here are these two elements of our society that have no relation of one to the other. So you've got to do something to equip this group, train, skills, make sure that the kind of education they receive is the kind of education most other Americans receive, not all, but most other Americans receive.

Then also make sure that once they are able, that there is some place they can go. You know if you train people to be electricians, and they are locked in the inner city far away from almost all their electricity, what are they going to do? How are they going to practice their trade? How are they going to get to it? Are there openings for electricians? Is there a chance for these people to get some work so unless you connect these two things, you are not going to do anything.

GATES: But does that mean that we have to move people out of the inner city?

BOND: I think so. I don't think these plans for development of enterprise zones or opportunity zones or whatever they are now called, I don't think they hold any real promise. I think you have to put people where jobs are or you have got to make them able to go from home to job and most city black people and even most rural black people don't live where jobs are. Jobs are in this ring around the city and unless you can get into that ring and bring with you some skill and some training or at least the aptitude for skill and training, forget it.

GATES: But many of our black politicians are only elected because of those concentrations of black people in the inner city so they tend to be against any kind of migration or relocation--the very same migration that brought people from the south as you well know starting at the turn of the century and particularly through World War I and the Great Depression.

BOND: Well, they have got to make some accommodation. They have got to either learn how to sell their program to an increasing number of white voters and hope they will be rewarded with an election victory or they've got to say I am just abandoning this little group I have pulled together to elect me to public office.

One of the sad things that happened after the '65 Voting Rights Act in the election of all these black elected officials is a great many of them decided that the number of voters required is the number of voters required to elect me. Once I've got that number, forget about it. The attempts at building coalition, at spreading the message, widening the opportunity -- political opportunity -- just went by the board.

GATES: Why did affirmative action work so well in its early stages? You said earlier that the reason that we have so many black people in the middle class is because of entitlement programs such as affirmative action.

BOND: I think it was because it was not initially viewed as black advantage must equal white disadvantage. It was viewed initially as opportunity. Here is John Smith, capable, talented, skilled. All you need to do is change one of these qualifications that has nothing to do with his job but will allow him to compete for it. He can do it, and she can do it. But slowly over time--I think largely because of the growing power, strength and cleverness of the right wing movement almost since 1964 to turn the Republican Party into the white people's party-- the combination of these things began to create a victim class of white men to the point now where white men are the largest group of complainants before the equal opportunity employment committee.

GATES: No one anticipated that result.

BOND: No one anticipated that, and I think in almost every case with some exceptions, there is no validity. These claims that these white men are being shouldered aside by minorities and women. What's happening is the economy has only so many positions. All of a sudden over the last 20 to 30 years, new people -- women and racial minorities -- are saying we want those jobs too. Not everybody can get one of these jobs and the people who are pushed aside are now claiming some grievance.

GATES: Are they justified?

BOND: In a minute fraction of the cases, I think they are justified. In the large number -- you know if I ask my students don't each of you know some white kid who should be here because his SAT scores were higher than that of John Robinson or Mary Smith, every single one of them will go up. Then I will say did all of you get in here because you had good SAT grades? Well, actually no, I am the president of the Chess Club or I played football or my dad went to school here, and that's why I got in here.

GATES: These are white kids?

BOND: These are white kids. So there is this perception that racial minorities and women are shouldering white people aside. That's not the reality. In 99 out of 100 case, it does not happen. But the perception is real, and the perception is felt.

GATES: Who within the black community benefitted the most from affirmative action?

BOND: First, I think it was college educated people. People who should have been getting decent jobs all along but couldn't because of ordinary racism and affirmative action helped to mute that. These people moved into the kind of jobs that their training and skills suggested they should have had. Secondly, I think it was people just a step below that. High level blue collar jobs. People who again should have had the jobs but because of racism couldn't get it. Now I think it is a larger and larger pool -- not large enough -- of people who come to the job market, come to the school and find that affirmative action has created a structure that allows them to compete. They are the beneficiaries of it. But we have not found a way, and I don't think affirmative action is the way to effect that population down at the bottom. They need something more.

GATES: Right, well, the myth was that this was a neo version of up from slavery. 'We are going to reach into the ghetto and drop off all of these kids at Harvard.' That's not really what happened.

BOND: It's not what happened. It shouldn't have been in retrospect expected to have happened. Affirmative action isn't a poverty program. It shouldn't be criticized for not having eliminated poverty in black America. Nobody beat Rodney King because he was poor. Right. People weren't saying, "you poor guy. I am going to beat you up."

They beat him because he was black. These people at the bottom face educational disability, skill disability, training disability. Their problems are not precisely those of the black college graduate who has got skill, who got ability, and who ought to have that job. So something new has got to be developed for them.

GATES: But how do we know where race starts and class stops or class starts and race stops?

BOND: I don't think you can always tell. I think these things overlap so much in our society that it is hard to separate one from the other. So if you are talking about this large population at the bottom, you have got to have a two-track program. You have got to make sure that given skill and given training, given education that race doesn't become an additional barrier. But you also if you don't have the skill, education, and training, then nothing works.

GATES: Given this political climate, how likely is it that the noble goals that you set out for solving the problem, for changing what I think of as the bell curve of class can actually be achieved?

BOND: Well, I have to tell you I am an optimist. I look back over my life, which is longer than just the mid-60's, and I see change. I see improvement; I see progress. So I've got to think I can see more in the next span of my life. So I am optimistic. But in the immediate short-term you have to be pessimistic about it. Nobody wants to pay anything for anything. Nobody wants to give more money to schools except perhaps the president and then only so kids who are already there can do better. Nobody seems to want to spend money for this population at the bottom which is going to be in desperate straights now that this welfare repeal has passed the congress and signed by the president. So in the short run you've got to be pessimistic about it.

INTERVIEW CONTINUES WITH DR.SKIP GATES TALKING WITH JULIAN BOND:

GATES: Could you go back to the civil rights movement a bit and chart it out for me, doctor, because we tend to forget now every King day. Basically the whole country takes off, and we hear "I have a dream" a thousand times on the radio. The King family is marketing the King logo in very important ways sort of the kitchification of Dr. King. That's important in terms of naturalizing a culture and one's people's achievements. But I remember when people would stand up -- I was a teenager -- but people would stand up and call Martin Luther King a handkerchief head. That his day was over. Am I misremembering?

BOND: No, you don't misremember at all. I was on the student non-violent coordinating committee. We thought we were the bad boys and girls of the civil rights movements.

GATES: We were bad.

BOND: No one dared to go before. We used to in a kind of affectionate way call Dr. King "da lawd." 'Here come the Lord; here come the Lord; here come the Lord.' We were critical of this notion that a man is going to come and save you. We pushed the notion that there is within each of us some leadership ability and that leaders spring up out of a movement. They don't create movements. Movements throw them up and throw them out and put them on the podium and put them on the platform. So yeah, that's true.

Then there came a point where we began to pull away from non violence, not just as a tactic but non violence period.

Most of the people in my organization were wedded to non-violence as a tactic. Strongly so. You are on the picket lines and somebody hits you, don't hit back. More and more we began to think that if I am walking down the street and somebody hits me, he better be ready because I am going to hit him back. Then more and more if I'm on the picket line and somebody hits me, I am not going to take it anymore. I think the nature of the work we did, the low pay we were getting, the negative experiences we had with government and that sort of orthodox liberalism in the United States just soured us on the chance of any progress being made using the techniques that we have made or the techniques that King suggested that we made.

GATES: What effect did the Panthers have?

BOND: Well, kind of two effects. One is sort of people who weren't in Oakland looked at them from afar and most of the times cheered them on. Kind of irritated they had stolen from us that Panther symbol and attached it to...

GATES: Oh, the Black Panther party in Alabama?

BOND: Yes, the Black Panther party in Alabama and attached it to their party. But interested in their free breakfast programs, interested in their concern for the community, interested in their ability to work with the lease of our communities, which is what we had thought we were doing to. But then they, as you know, became involved in this enormous internal warfare with each other and fell victim to this romanticizing of them that took place throughout the right/left..... and they crashed.

GATES: And with a lot of help from J. Edgar Hoover.

BOND: Yes, an enormous amount of help from J. Edgar Hoover.

GATES: What happened to the black white coalition, particularly the coalition between liberal Jews and liberal blacks in the '60s?

BOND: The black Jewish coalition, which has always been contentious. If you look back over 80 years, it has always been contentious, fell apart through a variety of reasons. First, Israel was seen as being more endangered, and many American Jews said I can't worry these other things, I've got to focus on Israel. Secondly, the anti-war movement attracted many liberals including many Jews and took them away from the civil rights movement. Thirdly, and probably most importantly, there is a strain of anti-semitism in black America that also has got a long and pathetic history but it began to flourish and flower again in the middle 1960s. That too caused this alienation between blacks and Jews. You could see it play itself out in New York city. Because we are such a New York centric population in this country, we imagined that this narrow New York lesson an American lesson. Blacks and Jews fighting in New York; they must be fighting every place else. They weren't. But we took this lesson. We applied it everywhere. This estrangement just drifted apart. It's interesting, however, that in the Congress, black and Jewish congressman still vote together almost as a unit both on civil rights and on aide to Israel so the division while real is not as real as it seems to be.

GATES: Do you think that it would be a good idea to try to put the coalition back together, or is it possible to put it back together?

BOND: I think you have to put it back together because black Americans can't make it by ourselves. We've got to have allies, and Jews are natural allies. Here are these two fellow victims of discrimination of different sorts and different kinds. But two fellow victims and they have a commonality and an interest in making sure this discrimination is rolled back. But you can't build a coalition on the graves of Goodman, Schwarner, and Chaney. You have to renew this coalition almost everyday.

GATES: What about coalitions with poor Hispanic people?

BOND: Absolutely. With Hispanics, with organized labor. But you know it requires that black Americans realize that we are not competing with these people for pieces of the small pie. What we ought to do is join with them in trying to create a larger pie so there is something there for each of us.