GATES: When Dr. King was near the end of his life he appeared to be moving in a new direction toward an economic analysis of the problem for the Black person in this country, particularly through things like the poor people's campaign. Help me to understand that.

BOND: Well, he had seen legal segregation struck down largely through efforts of the movement that he lead. He had seen Black people win the right to register to vote with the protection of the federal government and access to lunch counters and movie theaters and that kind of petty apartheid just swept away. But here are Black people still not part of the mainstream, still not economically integrated into the larger society, and he saw large numbers of whites and Hispanics and others equally excluded, perhaps not for the, all the same reasons, but equally excluded.

And so he put together this coalition of Appalachian whites, of Hispanics from the West Coast and from Texas, Black people from the rural south and urban north, and hoped that he would be building the poor people's movement, movement of poor people to demand federal action that would help solve their common problems, having already solved at least a portion of the racial problem of what he hoped would be the main component of this coalition. His death, and other factors, killed the chance of that happening, but it needs to happen again.

GATES: Because The Talented Tenth, as Du Bois put it at the turn of century, was busy through affirmative action scrambling into the new broader American middle class.

BOND: The Talented Tenth was winning its own place in society, working hard, scuffling hard, and was being separated from this population at the bottom and had no relationship with this population at the bottom.

GATES: Do you think the leadership abilities within the talented tenth are stronger now than they were when you were a young buck going around fighting the revolution in the mid 60s?

BOND: I think the abilities are greater and the skill level is higher. I'm not sure if the commitment to the larger mass is as great. It seems to me that this physical separation has also caused an intellectual separation. When I was a college student we used to have all these great lights in Black American come and talk to us and these were largely men and some women who seemed to be, to me to be concerned about everybody. These were race men, race women, they weren't nationalists, but they were race people. I'm not sure if, although we have a lot of race people today, if they have the same concern, or if they bring the same high level of commitment. And this could be just nostalgia for misspent youth, but somehow or another I just don't feel that we have the same concern for everybody from the very top to the very bottom, and that we focus so much on entrepreneurship, on creating businesses, that we forget that most people in America, not most Black people, most people in America, don't own businesses, they work, they get a paycheck, they own a salary and we need to concentrate on that large numbers of us who are not going to be entrepreneurs, who are going to go to jobs every day, and we need to find them jobs, we need to get them the skills, and we need to make sure they can succeed.

GATES: Who did you admire, among the leaders at the time in the 60s, who were your heroes?

BOND: Oh, just like a new one every week. At Morehouse they would bring these figures and they talked to us, I can remember Mordecai Johnson, the president of Howard University, spoke at my high school graduation for three hours! Didn't use a note. General Benjamin O'Davis came to speak to me, spit and polish in a uniform. You think Colin Powell looks good? Shoot, this guy looked like a Black Cary Grant, I mean, he was just, he was a military man. Young Martin Luther King came to speak to my college, it was his college as well. Every figure of substance, Lester Grainger of the Urban League, Roy Wilkins of NAACP, came through Morehouse College and all these other sites in Black America, and held up an image of what a leadership figure ought to be, you didn't have to agree with everything every one of them did, but here you saw dynamic, committed men who had made race their life's work.

GATES: Do you think that we're victims of nostalgia today, those of us in the postmodern talented tenth, you see books like Once Upon a Time We Were Colored, my own Colored People, August Wilson's recent declaration that we need Black theaters in Black communities, throw all the white people out of the boards of our arts organizations in cities with a population that's Black over 60 percent. Are we in danger of romanticizing the past? Would you go back to that world if you could?

BOND: No, I would never go back to that world, not in a minute. I think we over-romanticize the past. I think there was a lot about it that was attractive and nurturing and wholesome, but a lot about it was evil and awful and the people who lived in that world, even though I may have lived next door to the doctor and the doctor lived next door to the welfare recipient, there wasn't always much communication between them. There was a rigid class division while we lived in the same neighborhood, while we lived on the same block. So no, I would never go back to that world. There's a lot attractive there, a lot of nostalgia, the granny sitting on the porch, saying, I'm going to tell your mama when you come home. But no, I wouldn't go back.

GATES: Would you say that we have a crisis of black leadership?

BOND: I think we have a crisis of leadership and followship, and it works both ways. I speak on these college campuses and these kids tell me, Mr. Bond, there was an awful racial incident here last week. I wish Jesse Jackson would come here! Well, he's not coming, he's someplace else. Why should he come? Why can't you do it? Why do you have to wait for him? He's too busy. And then I think there's this leadership crisis which thinks things can't happen without me. If I'm not there, it's not a movement. And so these two groups which want each other and need each other so badly are almost at odds with each other, neither one able to move without the other, and it paralyzes the whole of us.

GATES: But is it possible, in a nation within a nation, as we are, 35 million people, and remember, there are only 27 million Canadians, is it possible for a King-like figure ever to emerge again?

BOND: I think maybe, but I don't think we ought to wait for him or her. We need to move ahead with what we can do with our own resources, our own abilities. I can't give an I Have a Dream speech, but I can talk! And some college student may not be able to reach the oratorical heights of Jesse Jackson, but he can organize, or she can pull her classmates together or can go down into the neighborhood near the school and help people there help kids with their schoolwork or help people form a buying coop or help them run a rent strike or get that traffic light at the school crossing, or do all of those things. We don't have to wait for somebody to tell us to do those things, we can do those things ourselves.

GATES: Well, what are the responsibilities of those of us who are making it to those still trapped at the lower end of the bell curve?

BOND: I think they are numerous, they are first because we have the power of access public forums to articulate the pain and the suffering of those who don't seem able to speak for themselves, and to reach back to those, and see if we can't pull them up, go to them, work with them, do anything and everything we can to say, listen, you're somebody. I don't want to sound like Jesse Jackson, but you are somebody. You have worth, you have humanity, you can be what you want to if you get this, if you get this, if you get that, and some of that is within your own power to get.

GATES: Is their plight something that you worry about, that you think about actively?

BOND: I don't want to say I'm consumed about race, because you can't be, but you read in the newspapers of these attempts to roll back affirmative action and you see this growing hostility in the larger world to any initiative that assists, that aids Black people, and think of the work already done, and you wonder, gee will this ever end.

GATES: Yeah, do you feel guilty about it?

BOND: I feel as if I and others have never done enough, and we never be able to do enough.

GATES: When we were growing up, in the 50s, the blackest thing you could be was Thurgood Marshall or Dr. King--or one of those race men or women that you've described so well. But now, I read recently the results of a Gallup Poll survey--inner city kids here in Washington--and it said, list 'things white.' And on that list were the following: getting straight A's in school, speaking standard English, visiting the Smithsonian. Now, if anybody had said anything like that in my neighborhood, first of all their mother would have beat their butt and then they would have checked them into a mental institution. What happened to us?

BOND: I do not understand this perversity that doing well is white. When I was a kid doing well was doing well, and you were held up as a standard to the others who, so they could achieve to do as well as you could. And the kid who got the best grades or got admitted to the college or won the oratorical contest or the essay contest, we applauded and cheered and revered these people.

GATES: And the spelling bees were big in Piedmont, West Virginia -- beat that white boy in that spelling bee!

BOND: Oh yes, absolutely. You had not only to be as good as, you had to be better than. Jackie Robinson could hit the ball further, could catch the ball easier, could run faster, could do things better than white people could do. And why this has, reversal has occurred, at least on the level of academic achievement, is a mystery to me.

GATES: How can we change it Julian, we have to do something about it, otherwise there will always be two Black communities.

BOND: I'm not sure how you change it. I think in the schools you've got to raise up and celebrate those kids who do well. You've got to connect doing well there with doing well in life. You've got to point out that those Johnny and Sally who skipped out on the day of the test, their future is dim, their future is dark. The best they can hope for is McDonalds, and maybe not even that. But I have a feeling that teachers are doing that, are saying that now, and why that message is not getting through, maybe needs to come from more places, from more voices, maybe you got to talk to mom and dad, maybe we've got to make sure people come to the PTA, but that is a horrific, horrific thing for young people to believe.

GATES: What about the role of the church, more. I remember talking to Cornel West about whether or not anyone but Mr. Farrakhan could have called the Million Man March, and I said, no one could have called it. And he said, oh, there's one group could have called it. And I said who, and he said the Black Baptists, he said there're 14 million Black Baptists. What about the role of the church?

BOND: Well, the church has always been a bulwark of Black America, but it's a mistake for us to think that during the heyday of the movement that every church was involved. In Birmingham in 63, for example, only a small circle of Black ministers supported Dr. King and supported the movement. The rest stood aside and preached that there was salvation, but it wasn't here on earth, it was after you've passed, shuffled off this mortal coil.

GATES: And don't rile up that white man.

BOND: Exactly. I get the impression that more and more Black churches are realizing they've got to engage in this community they're in, that their membership, overwhelmingly female, doesn't speak to the problems of young Black men who are out there in the streets, some of them selling drugs, some of them going nowhere, some of them with no futures at all. And I get the impression that more and more are reaching out, more and more are doing. But as I say, I don't think any of us do enough, and Black churches have never and do not now do enough. They don't use this enormous resource, the money, the physical facility, the leadership ability of the ministers, the leadership abilities that the members learn in running the deacon board, don't use that to the fullest extent possible.

GATES: And they could, in addition to forming economic coalitions and becoming an economic base within the larger society, seems so me that they too could perpetuate Black culture to make Sunday school culture school, like Hebrew school, for example.

BOND: Oh, absolutely. When I was a kid, and I hate I feel like my dad, "when I was your age," when I was a kid, it was in the church or at Spelman College where you heard ...Marian Anderson sang in Black churches. Our artists, our writers, our intellectuals, found an audience in the Black church. I guess they find that audience on Black college campuses and on campuses that celebrate Black history month now, but I think you're absolutely right. These places out not just be centers of spiritual uplift and instruction and training, but of moral training and of intellectual training and culture preservation. They did it and they can do it again.

GATES: Last question. How do we regenerate more values within the African-American community? I mean you hear so much political rhetoric about the man or about white racism but very few people are willing, in public, to say we have moral and ethical responsibilities to and of ourselves. How do we go about regenerating that spirit among our own people?

BOND: I think it comes down partially to leadership, and two people who consistently talk about this are Louis Farrakhan and Jesse Jackson. And when Jackson talks about it he's accused of being reactionary. When Farrakhan talks about it people say it's just a cover for your anti-Semitism.

But I think we need to listen to them when they speak about this and we need to have this message repeated over and over and over again by the minister in the pulpit, by the businessman on the job, by the schoolteacher in the classroom, by the PTA president, by this whole range of leadership that runs up and down through our community.

And you've got to start telling our young people that listen, mom and dad are the best model for a family, mom and dad are the best model if you're thinking about children and mom and dad ought to be married and dad ought to have the chance of a job, mom too as well, but you've got to just thunder this into people and even grab them by the shoulders and shake them, I think.

But you've got to get this message in children, you've got to get this message in high school kids, you've got to spread this message through society that being a decent person, living an honest just life, that's the hallmark of being a good citizen. It's not just voting, it's not just being a member of the NAACP, it's living a good life, a decent life and we can do it, I think.

GATES: One more question. I did an essay for Sports Illustrated in 1991. I had their research department count the number of black lawyers, black dentists, black doctors and black athletes and it turns out that there were 20,000 black lawyers and 1200 black professional athletes in all sports including the minor leagues. Now nobody believed that statistic. How did we get to the point where our people think it's easier to be Michael Jordan than Vernon Jordan?

BOND: I think many of our people don't know Vernon Jordan because he is such an insider, but Michael Jordan is just everywhere. We see him everywhere. So you've got a big fight there to expose the Vernon Jordans of this world and compare them with the Michael Jordans. For all we know Vernon may make more money than Michael as quiet as it's kept. But I think Vernon has to go to schools and say look at me, I'll tell you what I do, I advise the president of the United States, I help decide policy that affects every single American, black, white and otherwise, and other people like him to be held up, promoted as models.

These people were my models, the Vernon Jordans of my generation were my models and we've got to put these models out there. There's got to be more -- I mean Michael is a wonderful guy, I wish I could do that but it's a dream for me and it's a dream for these kids. We've got to say this is a dream, you can't do it.

GATES: How much of this problem is black America's problem, how much is America's problem?

BOND: I don't think you can quantify it and say 50-50 or 90-10 or anything like that. It's obvious that racism, to me at any rate, is an overwhelming problem for black Americans and if it were to be removed today tomorrow the economic, social, political, educational condition of black Americans would just bloom. Wouldn't be perfect but it would bloom because the previous racism from today back has caused so much disadvantage it's going to take time to overcome that.

Having said that, there are many things we should be doing that have nothing to do with white people, nothing to do with racism, to help ameliorate the conditions we find ourselves living in. We ought to be in block clubs, we ought to be at the PTA, we ought to be doing this, we ought to be doing that, we ought to join -- we ought to do the American thing and join organizations. We do this by the millions. I mean we're in every kind of group you can name. You name a group, we're in it. And you look in our neighborhoods for groups and we're in them, and we've got to turn the energy of these groups towards civic uplift.

Not towards civil rights, towards civic uplift, toward picking up the trash in the street, toward helping the kids in school, toward doing this, toward doing that, toward doing this, nothing to do with white people. So I can't say it's 90% them and 10% us or 50-50 but it's an equally shared responsibility andI don't believe white people have picked up their share, I don't believe black people have either.