"It Will Be Worse Than in 2000"

Julian Bond, chairman of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, has devoted his life to civil rights and voting rights issues. After a group of black college students refused to leave a whites-only lunch counter at a Woolworth's store in Greensboro, N.C., in 1960, Bond -- then a student at Atlanta's Morehouse College -- helped form the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. Famous for its "Freedom Rides" challenging segregation, SNCC also worked to register black voters in rural areas of the deep South in the early 1960s, with Bond serving as the organization's communications director.

Elected to the Georgia House of Representatives in 1965, the 25-year-old Bond was denied his seat by legislators angry about his opposition to the Vietnam War; he was seated after three elections and a unanimous decision of the Supreme Court. Chairman of the NAACP since 1998, Bond is now a distinguished professor at American University in Washington and a professor of history at the University of Virginia. He narrated the prize-winning documentaries "A Time for Justice" and "Eyes on the Prize."

Salon spoke to Bond on Wednesday by telephone about Republican attempts to suppress the black vote in next Tuesday's election, including the placing of 3,600 election "challengers" at the polls in Ohio. The Republican secretary of state in Ohio, a crucial swing state with 20 electoral votes, asserts the challengers are needed to prevent voting fraud. But Bond countered that if fraud is really the issue, why are the GOP challengers focusing on cities like Cleveland, which have large Democratic-leaning African-American and Hispanic populations?

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