“Julian Bond opened the NAACP convention yesterday with a speech as banal as it was irrelevant…Bond seems incapable of appreciating the yawning gulf between his vision for the NAACP and the concrete needs of the masses of Black families, who struggle mightily to raise children in communities ravaged by joblessness, bad schools, gang violence, single motherhood, and perhaps most pernicious, hopelessness.  He offers nothing in the sort of a strategy to pragmatically address these challenges.  Instead, he offers stale bromides about the twin obsessions of Bond’s NAACP: government and White folk.  As Bond would have it, Black folk’s capacity to generate solutions to their challenges is apparently limited to petitioning either of these external powers.  And because the Bond NAACP’s approach is so preoccupied with outside forces, he’s left with little but the ad hominem when those forces don’t share his concern for the Black community. Sadly, the NAACP — the grand organization founded by W.E.B. DuBois and which was indispensable to the dismantling of Jim Crow — is now a relic.  We badly need a re-imagined, reinvigorated NAACP.  As long as Julian Bond is at the helm, that new reality is implausible.  Bond must go.” – Shavar Jeffries, law professor blogging at Black Professors blog