Julian Bond's Equality Maryland Jazz Brunch Keynote Address

Julian Bond's Equality Maryland Jazz Brunch Keynote Address
Baltimore, Maryland
November 20, 2005

Copyright 2005 by Julian Bond

I am honored to speak here today.

I believe this invitation represents a common acknowledgement that denial of rights to anyone is wrong, and that struggles for rights are indivisible. I am grateful as well to those who have thanked me for offering my support for our common cause.

I feel this afternoon a little like that great son of Maryland, the abolitionist Frederick Douglass must have felt in April, 1888. Douglass, by then an old man, was addressing a women’s convention in Seneca Falls, New York. They praised him for his devotion to the cause of women’s suffrage. Forty years earlier, at the world’s first Women’s Rights Convention, when Susan B. Anthony made a motion that American women had the right to vote, it was Douglass who seconded the motion.

In 1888, Douglass reflected back on that moment and told his audience,

“When I ran away from slavery, it was for myself; when I advocated emancipation, it was for my people; but when I stood up for the rights of women, self was out of the question, and I found a little nobility in the act.”

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http://www.equalitymaryland.org/PR_2005/PR2005.11.20.htm