Published Thursday, June 25, 1998 Civil rights leaders gauge progress since Humphrey speech Eric Black / Star Tribune Hubert Humphrey's 1948 civil rights speech was the excuse -- but seldom the topic -- of a symposium at the State Capitol, where prominent white, black and Hispanic activists talked about civil rights issues Wednesday. NAACP Chairman Julian Bond gave a rousing defense of affirmative action programs. Writer Richard Rodriguez said America is turning brown and called for an acknowledgment of the complexity of race relations. Hubert Humphrey Mayor Hubert H. Humphrey of Minneapolis addresses the Democratic National Convention in Philadelphia, July 14, 1948. And former Mississippi Gov. William Winter said the civil rights revolution "did as much to free white folks as it did blacks -- free us from our fears and prejudices, from our reluctance to embrace change, from our defense of the indefensible." The occasion was the 50th anniversary of Humphrey's famous speech at the Democratic National Convention of 1948, in which he argued successfully for the adoption of a progressive civil rights plank in the party platform. The symposium took its title, "The Time has Arrived," from the speech. The Humphrey Forum of the Humphrey Institute of Public Affairs at the University of Minnesota sponsored the symposium in the House chamber. The audience of about 150 included some of Humphrey's old friends and many longtime leaders of the local civil rights movement. Bond, a veteran civil rights activist and former Georgia legislator, acknowledged the civil rights advances of the 1960s but characterized the current moment as one of backsliding, in which conservatives oppose programs that might benefit blacks, claiming that their goal is a color-blind society. "They're color-blind, all right," he cracked, because they are blind to the disadvantages that color still imposes on blacks struggling for social and economic equality. To these "new racists," as he called them, "social and economic equality is a burden American culture cannot bear." To explain continuing disparities between the races, Bond said, the new racists adopt a "Susan Smith defense," referring to the 1994 case of a woman who drowned her sons, then blamed the crime on nonexistent black men. "They say, 'Black people did it; they did it to themselves. Those people are poor because they're pathological, and pathological because they're poor.' " Opponents of affirmative action, Bond said, "say it used to work, but it doesn't work now. Or we used to need it, but we don't need it now. Or that when it works, it only gives preferential treatment to those who don't need it." But the reality is that "affirmative action isn't about giving preferential treatment to minorities," he said. "It's about removing the preferential treatment that whites have received for centuries." Bond said the current argument over affirmative action reminds him of a football game that's in the fourth quarter. The white team is leading the black team 145-3. The white team owns the stadium, the ball and the referees, wrote the rules and has been cheating since the beginning of the game. Now, with two minutes to go, the new quarterback of the white team says, "Let's play fair." Unexpected praise Rodriguez -- author, television commentator and editor of a San Francisco-based news service -- gave a more surprising presentation, in light of the occasion. He praised Humphrey, saying that he wanted "to honor the America he has bequeathed me" and that Humphrey gave him "a sense of the moral life of this country." But he also praised the man who defeated Humphrey for the presidency in 1968. "Richard Nixon is my godfather," Rodriguez said, because of a 1973 document that grouped Americans into five racial categories, including Hispanic. Rodriguez also said, "there is no Hispanic race," because the category blends people of various racial mixtures. Most Americans who consider themselves Hispanic are mestizos, he said, a blend of European and Latin American Indian peoples. Others are part African, part Indian. But whatever the racial origin of the group, it is increasing fast in the United States and soon will become the biggest minority group. "Mexico is coming this way," Rodriguez said, "and it's going to change you whether you like it or not." Blacks, he said, are "terrified of the numerical supremacy of Hispanics." He said the United States needs to stop thinking of race as an issue between blacks and whites and to acknowledge the heterogeneity of the population and the complexity of the issue. Unfinished work Winter, a longtime Mississippi progressive and a member of President Clinton's race advisory board, said, "it is even more important today to create a racially united America than it was when Hubert Humphrey made his great speech." Like Bond, he said the continuing social and economic disparities by race indicate that the country "must continue to work to eliminate differences in social, educational and economic opportunities." The celebration of the anniversary of Humphrey's speech began Tuesday evening with a program at the Humphrey Institute. There, journalist Bill Moyers called the 1948 speech "one of the great acts of courage in American political history." In the 1960s, when Moyers worked in the Kennedy and Johnson administrations and Humphrey was a senator and then vice president, the two worked together on legislation to establish the Peace Corps and the Civil Rights Act of 1964. Moyers said Humphrey's sincerity and generosity so impressed him that "if I had pursued a life in politics, he is the figure I would most have wanted to emulate."