Julian Bond

Politician and activist

One of the founders of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) during the early 1960s, Bond also served in the Georgia legislature for twenty years and as chairman of the board of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). He won an important First Amendment case in the US Supreme Court in 1966 when he was refused admittance by the Georgia legislature because of his stand against the war in Vietnam.

Early Life

Born in Nashville, Tennessee, because his mother did not want her son born in a Georgia hospital, Horace Julian Bond was the first son of Horace Mann Bond, president of Fort Valley State College, a black institution in central Georgia. Bond’s mother, a graduate of Fisk University, had been a librarian. When Bond was about five years old, his father accepted a position at Lincoln University, a black college in Pennsylvania. Horace and his wife, Julia, moved Bond and his older sister, Jane, to the North. Bond’s parents instilled in him a love of reading and the pursuit of knowledge. Because of his reputation as an educator of black youths, Horace entertained famous African Americans such as W. E. B. Du Bois and Paul Robeson in their home.

Bond’s earliest education took place in a two-room schoolhouse, and he was a bright student who tested at the top of his class. When he was twelve, his parents decided to send him to George School, a private Quaker preparatory school in Newtown, Pennsylvania. In 1955, Emmett Till, a young black teenager from Chicago, was brutally murdered in Mississippi. Bond was horror-stricken that a black boy the same age as he—only visiting the South, as Bond often did—had been killed in such a fashion.

Bond was an inconsistent student at George School, but college was a family expectation. In 1957, as Bond was deciding where to enroll for college, his father accepted a position as president at Atlanta University. Bond enrolled at nearby Morehouse College, where he cofounded a literary magazine, Pegasus.

In February 1960, four students from North Carolina Agricultural and Technical College, a historically black school, staged a sit-in at a Greensboro, North Carolina, Woolworth’s lunch counter. Lonnie King, a fellow Morehouse student, asked Bond if he thought the same action should be taken in Atlanta. Bond agreed that it should. From this decision arose the Atlanta Committee on Appeal for Human Rights (known as COHAR). On March 15, 1960, Bond led a group of students on a sit-in at the Atlanta City Hall cafeteria, for which he was arrested. This action caught the attention of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC), which was founded in 1957 and led by Martin Luther King, Jr.

King invited African American student leaders from across the South to Shaw University in North Carolina to discuss the future of civil rights. At this meeting, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) was born. Back in Atlanta, Bond continued to work with COHAR, raising funds for the organization while working at The Atlanta Inquirer, a black newspaper founded by students. In his free time, Bond dated Spelman College student Alice Clopton, with whom he would later elope.

Life’s Work

At first, Bond and Alice hid their marriage from their parents, but eventually they broke the news and the couple moved in with Bond’s family. They soon had children, and Bond began to think about how to provide for his young family. Bond handily won an election for a seat in the Georgia House of Representatives, carrying 82 percent of the vote. However, before his term began, the SNCC issued a strongly worded statement condemning the war in Vietnam. When questioned by a reporter, Bond said that he agreed with and supported the statement. The Georgia House of Representatives charged Bond with disorderly conduct and voted 184–12 to deny him his seat in the legislature in January 1966. By the end of the year, the US Supreme Court had ruled the Georgia House had violated Bond’s First Amendment right to free expression. For the first time, the nation’s highest court had restricted a state government’s power to decide the qualifications of its members.

Bond again drew controversy and attention when, at the age of twenty-eight, his name was put forth for the vice presidential nomination at the 1968 Democratic National Convention. Under the US Constitution, he was too young to hold that office; his nomination had been made as a procedural stunt to thwart the Georgia Democratic Party. Nevertheless, it caused a stir on the convention floor. Bond remained a significant national public figure through the 1970s. He returned to Morehouse in 1971 to complete his bachelor’s degree and was elected in 1974 to Georgia’s state senate, where he served until 1987. Meanwhile, Bond became a media fixture, hosting an episode of the television comedy series Saturday Night Live in 1977 and appearing weekly on NBC’s Today in 1979.

Bond’s marriage of twenty-five years ended in 1987. His wife accused him of using cocaine, an accusation she later rescinded. However, a woman Bond was dating was arrested and sentenced to a twenty-two-year jail term for dealing drugs. Bond also was named in a paternity suit and, after initial denials, eventually admitted to fathering the child in question. Professionally, Bond also was adrift. He lost a hotly contested election for a US Congress seat to fellow civil rights activist John Robert Lewis. Although the two continued to collaborate when necessary, their friendship was over. Near the decade’s end, Bond narrated the critically acclaimed two-part PBS documentary Eyes on the Prize in 1987 and 1990. He also hosted the television program America’s Black Forum from 1980 to 1997 and wrote a nationally syndicated newspaper column, Viewpoint.

In 1990, Bond married attorney Pamela S. Horowitz. Throughout the ensuing decade, he taught at several prestigious colleges and universities. In 1994, he narrated the Academy Award-winning documentary A Time for Justice. It was Bond’s election as chairman of the board of directors of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), however, that became his lasting legacy in the Civil Rights movement. A former president of the organization’s Atlanta chapter, Bond had long desired the chairmanship of the national organization but was considered too radical by some. Upon his election in 1998, he spearheaded a campaign to raise fifty million dollars to rejuvenate the ninety-three-year-old organization’s membership. Bond was wary of changing the long-standing goals of the NAACP, however, and reaffirmed the organization’s strategies of mobilization, litigation, and coalition. Along with NAACP president Kweisi Mfume, Bond shepherded the organization through its one hundredth anniversary and some of its greatest years of influence. He stepped down in 2010.

A great believer in civil rights for all Americans, Bond also spoke forcefully in support of the rights of gay men and lesbians. He went so far as to boycott Coretta Scott King’s funeral because it was held at a church that had expressed anti-gay sentiments. On October 11, 2009, Bond gave a speech at the National Equality March in Washington, DC, in which he defended the rights of the gay community.

Other figures of the civil rights movement, such as Lewis and Al Sharpton, expressed their condolences upon hearing that Bond had passed away in Fort Walton Beach, Florida, following a brief illness on August 15, 2015, at the age of seventy-five. He was survived by his wife, three sons, two daughters, and several grandchildren.

Significance

Using his skills as an organizer, writer, and orator, Bond spent his adult life in the trenches of the Civil Rights movement. He saw his opportunity to serve the citizens of Atlanta in the Georgia Legislature. In the process of taking the seat he won, he helped reaffirm the First Amendment protection of free speech. With Morris Dees, Bond helped to found the Southern Poverty Law Center, a public-interest law firm based in Montgomery, Alabama, in 1971. Bond became the first president of the center in 1979, and he was later named president emeritus. He served as chairman of the national board of directors of the NAACP from 1998 to 2010. He also worked as a professor at universities such as Drexel, the University of Pennsylvania, Harvard, American, and the University of Virginia.

Bibliography

Bond, Julian. “Interview with Julian Bond.” Interview by Elizabeth Gritter. Southern Cultures 12.1 (2006): 76–91. Print.

Brown, C. Stone. “Julian Bond: Leading the Movement into the Millennium.” Crisis 107.1 (2000): 28. Print.

Dreifus, Claudia. “Julian Bond.” The Progressive 62.8 (1998): 32. Print.

Jordan, Denise M. Julian Bond: Civil Rights Activist and Chairman of the NAACP. Berkeley Heights: Enslow, 2001. Print.

Neary, John. Julian Bond: Black Rebel. New York: Morrow, 1971. Print.

Reed, Roy. "Julian Bond, Charismatic Civil Rights Leader, Dies at 75." New York Times. New York Times, 16 Aug. 2015. Web. 22 June 2016.