Julian Bond was born Horace Julian Bond on January 14, 1940 in Nashville, TN. He and his family moved to Pennsylvania, where his father, Horace Mann Bond, was appointed president of Lincoln University. Bond was expected to follow in his footsteps as an educator but the young man was more attracted by journalism and political activism. Aged 12, Bond was sent to the George School near Philadelphia, a private Quaker-run establishment. There he first encountered racial resentment when he began dating a White girl, incurring the disapproval of White students and the school authorities. Another five years later, his father was appointed as Dean of Education at Atlanta University and the family moved south again.
In 1957, Julian Bond graduated from the George School. Bond was enrolled at the prestigious Morehouse College where he attended a class taught by Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. However, extracurricular activities drew his attention more than academic studies. He earned a varsity letter on the swim team and founded "The Pegasus" literary magazines well as serving as an intern with Time magazine. In Atlanta, Bond embarked upon a lifelong career of social and political activism. Bond became recognized as a key figure in the Student Movement for civil rights in the early 1960s while attending Morehouse College. In 1960 he and other Atlanta University Center students organized the Committee On Appeal for Human Rights (COAHR).
The organization rallied hundreds of college students and garnered the support of veteran activists for picket lines, sit-ins and boycotts. Those demonstrations and a federal lawsuit filed by COAHR spurred the desegregation of Atlanta lunch counters, restaurants, and parks by 1962. In 1960 he co-founded the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), a student activist group that gave young Black Americans a revolutionary loudspeaker during the civil rights movement. Julian left Morehouse halfway through his senior year to focus exclusively on SNCC. He served as the organization's national communications director (1961-1965). Bond immediately understood the significance of SNCC and the role that students could play in expanding the civil rights movement.
The younger generation of Black Americans was ready to use new tactics to fight for the kind of social change their parents and grandparents sought in previous eras. He organized campaigns to register Black voters, and led student protests against segregation and Jim Crow throughout Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, and Arkansas. On the strength of his personality and quick intellect, he moved to the center of the civil rights action in Atlanta, the unofficial capital of the movement, at the height of the struggle for racial equality in the early 1960s. By the mid-1960s, Bond became disillusioned with the organization’s policy of nonviolence, White participation in the movement and with the radical direction of SNCC. Bond made the decision leave the organization.
During this period, Bond and some fellow Black students visited the Georgia House of Representatives. Having deliberately sat in the Whites-only visitors’ section, they were escorted out by Capitol police, but he was destined to return to the House. Following the passage of the Voting Rights Act in 1965, Julian was elected to the Georgia House of Representatives with 82% of the vote. He was only 25 years old and part of the inaugural group of seven African-Americans elected to Georgia’s House of Representatives. His colleagues, however, refused to seat him, despite his election. Their stated objection was his endorsement of a Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee statement accusing the United States of violating international law in Vietnam. SNCC’s statement called out the hypocrisy of the U.S. government, which claimed to wage a war for democracy overseas at the same moment it was also waging war against those fighting for democracy in the United States. This was in response to the murder of veteran Samuel Younge in Tuskegee, Alabama.
He took his fight all the way to the Supreme Court. Bond wrote a graphic novel about the Vietnam War while he was also fighting for the right to be able to take his elected seat. Bond wrote a graphic novel about the Vietnam War while he was also fighting for the right to be able to take his elected seat. "Vietnam: An Antiwar Comic Book" was written in 1967 to provide a critical analysis of the U.S. involvement in Vietnam and the connection between the struggles of the Vietnamese and the struggles of African Americans for self-determination and human rights in an easy to read format. The Supreme Court ruled that the Georgia House of Representatives was required to seat him. The U.S Supreme Court concluded in the 1966 court case Bond v. Floyd that Bond’s freedom of speech had been violated and established precedent for generations of public representatives to express themselves freely regarding state and national policy.
He finally assumed office in 1967. He was twenty-eight years old. Bond went on to serve in the state Legislature for four terms, mostly in conspicuous isolation from white colleagues who saw him as an interloper and a rabble-rouser. Bond was a productive and effective state senator advocating for many important social causes. As a lawmaker, he sponsored bills to establish a program for the research and treatment of sickle cell anemia and to provide low-interest home loans to low-income Georgians. He also helped create a majority-Black congressional district in Atlanta. He continued to campaign around the country, not only for civil rights but also for human rights, not only at home but also in the global community.
Bond would go on to become the first African-American chair of the Fulton county Senate delegation. In 1968 he attended the Democratic National Convention, where he was a co-chairman of a racially integrated challenge delegation from Georgia. His public profile shot up when he gave a rousing speech in favor of peace candidate Senator Eugene McCarthy and his name was even placed into nomination for vice president. He declined to pursue a serious candidacy because he was too young to meet the constitutional age requirement, but from that moment on he was a national figure. In 1971, Bond returned to Morehouse College, and became the first president of the Southern Poverty Law Center, a non-profit group that served disenfranchised minorities and surveyed the actions of hate groups. He served as SPLC’s president from 1971 to 1979, and later as board member and President Emeritus.
Mr. Bond would return to the Georgia General Assembly as a State Senator in 1974, a position which he held for 12 years. In 1986, Bond ran against his long-time friend and SNCC co-founder John Lewis to represent Georgia's 5th Congressional District, but was narrowly defeated in runoff. When he lost, he resigned from the Senate, spending the next two decades focused on education and media work. He was a favorite on the college lecture circuit, teaching at universities throughout the north and south. He was the president of the Atlanta branch of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) from 1978 to 1989. Similarly, Bond served four terms on the NAACP’s national board as well as Board Chairman since 1998. He continued in the role until his resignation in 2010. Despite dropping out of college in the early 1960s, Bond returned a decade later to complete his English degree.
Julian Bond became a celebrated educator, holding appointments at several leading institutions including Harvard University, Williams College, Drexel University and the University of Penn. He played a central role in America’s civil rights movement, spanning student protest and activist politics to institutional leadership and academia. Although his fight for social justice was focused on race, he also campaigned for peace, gay rights and the environment, among other issues. Bond has been tireless in his commitment to public service. Bond led the NAACP, the Southern Poverty Law Center, and the Southern Elections Fund, as well as taught Civil Rights courses at various universities. His collection offers insight into political strategies, local organizing, and educational approaches to highly significant social movements in the twentieth century. In 2009 he was honored with the Spingarn Medal, the highest honor given by the NAACP. Julian Bond, a soldier of American Civil Rights, passed away in August, 2015, leaving behind a legacy of passion, service, and equitable justice.