With a standing-room only crowd before him, Julian Bond, chair of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, discussed “Civil Rights Now and Then, Then and Now” during Wittenberg’s annual Martin Luther King Jr. Commemorative Convocation, Jan. 20, in Weaver Chapel.

A leader in the movements for civil rights, economic justice and peace, Bond urged listeners “to fight discrimination, wherever it raises its ugly head” and “to imitate the well-lived life” of Martin Luther King Jr., “not simply mourn the martyr’s death.

“King did more than tell the nation of his dream at the March on Washington,” Bond said. “In the years before and after, he addressed the human condition, the larger world beyond America’s shores. Racial justice, economic equality and world peace — these were themes that occupied King’s life; they ought to occupy ours today.”

From his student days as a founder of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee to his current position as NAACP chair, Bond has been on the cutting edge of racial change since 1960.

An activist who has faced jail for his convictions, Bond, a veteran of more than 20 years in the Georgia General Assembly, noted that all people are “implicated in the continuation of inequality,” and that “it will require our common effort to bring it to an end.

“A civil rights agenda for a new century must include continuing to litigate, to organize, to mobilize, forming coalitions of the caring and concerned, joining ranks against the comfortable, the callous and the smug,” he said.

This agenda, he continued, must include fighting against discrimination, and “insuring that every citizen registers and votes and guaranteeing the irregularities, suppression, nullification and outright theft of black votes that happened on Election Day 2000 never ever happen again.” It also must include a cessation of racial profiling and must ensure that today’s children have the best education.

“We have a long and honorable tradition of social justice in this country,” Bond added, and “it still sends forth the message that when we act together, we can overcome.”