Julian Bond, the board chairman of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, sees gay rights as civil rights.

"But a better way to put it is I support civil rights for everyone," he said during an interview in Richmond last night before Equality Virginia, a leading gay-rights group in the state, presented him the Equality Commonwealth Award, its top honor.

Some people, Bond said, are "hostile to the very fact of homosexuality. . . . They think it's something you decide to do or not. But that's not true."

One's sexuality is "immutable," he said.

Asked if the NAACP supports gay rights, Bond said, "We supported a gay-rights march in 1993. Granted, that was some years ago, but our board passed a resolution in February in support of civil rights for all people."

Bond said America's civil-rights movement is older than the marches, sit-ins and other activism of the 1960s. "It started in 1619 when the first African-Americans came to Virginia. But I joined the movement in 1960, when I was a college student."

While a student at Morehouse College in Atlanta, Bond was a founder of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and a leader of protests and voter-registration campaigns across the South.

Asked the status of civil rights today, Bond said, "The legal battles have largely been won but are still under attack. If you look at school integration, for example, it's been 51 years since the Supreme Court said segregated schools were illegal. But we know that within blocks of where we are, there are segregated schools."

Bond, 65, and his wife now live in Washington, and he is a professor of modern American history at the University of Virginia. After last night's interview in the Marriott Hotel downtown, they walked across Fifth Street to the Greater Richmond Convention Center for Equality Virginia's second-annual Commonwealth Dinner.

In prepared remarks for the several hundred people at the dinner, Bond said, "At the NAACP, we were proud to have opposed the federal marriage amendment and its wrong-headed state versions, and we oppose efforts to write bigotry into Virginia's constitution, too.

"I always thought Virginia was for lovers, not against them."

This entry was posted on Sunday, April 03, 2005 at 11:15 AM. Want to discuss? Leave a comment below.