COVINGTON, Ky.
- The fight for racial equality has unfortunately become a spectator sport for far too many people, two civil rights leaders said Friday night.
Julian Bond, a University of Virginia professor, and Anne Braden, a visiting professor at Northern Kentucky University, both called for the racially diverse crowd of about 75 at the Northern Kentucky Community Center to become more active.
''There is hope,'' Mr. Bond said.
Advances made in the 1960s were the result of people becoming involved, the speakers said - something that is needed if the modern fight for civil rights is to succeed.
''That movement succeeded when the victims became their own best champions,'' said Mr. Bond, whose grandfather was a slave born in Kentucky.
''Surely there are men and women here tonight, young and old, who can do the same,'' he said.
Both speakers blamed civil rights losses in recent years on a lack of understanding that programs like affirmative action have helped people otherthan just African Americans.
''Washington bureaucrats, gays and lesbians (and) supporters of civil rights have replaced the Soviet Union as the evil empire,'' Mr. Bond said.
Instead of continuing the advances of the 1960s, America has seen a role reversal that casts minorities as the oppressor and white males as victim, said Mr. Bond, 57, who was a student of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. at Morehouse College in 1961.
''This perversion of reality occurred as the result of an organized campaign which continues until this day,'' Mr. Bond said. ''It's led by a curious mix of whites and blacks, academics, journalists and policy makers, funded largely by corporations.''
Mr. Bond said the blacks who support an end to affirmative action are in the minority, but that black minority gets most of the attention because it's ''man bites dog.''
The notion that African Americans got too much is ''the worst lie that has ever been perpetrated in this country,'' said Mrs. Braden, 73, who was once charged with sedition for selling her Jefferson County home to an African-American family.
Programs that help African Americans also benefit white people, she said.
Mrs. Braden said Americans are reluctant to admit racism was an integral part of the country's foundation.
''You don't want to face the fact that your society is wrong,'' she said.
