Bond: No.
Mr. Novak: Would you fight to save your family, your household?
Mr. Bond: That again is another hypothetical situation. You know, the usual question put to pacifists is “What would you do if someone began beating your wife?” But no one is beating my wife right now. I think of myself as a pacifist. I believe in nonviolence.
Mr. Novak: Let me ask you a non-hypothetical question: Do you approve of the Deacons for Defense and Justice, which is a Negro group which does bear arms and has had close ties with civil rights groups in the South?
Mr. Bond: No, I don’t approve of anyone anywhere under any circumstances engaging in violence.
Mr. Novak: When did you become a pacifist, Mr. Bond?
Mr. Bond: I began thinking about pacifism and about nonviolence in 1957, when I was a student at a Quaker school in Pennsylvania, and since then, since my involvement in the civil rights movement has become deeper and deeper, the feeling has just increased.
Mr. Novak: When you first applied for the draft, did you list yourself as a pacifist?
Mr. Bond: No, I didn’t. The army told me that they weren’t interested in my serving with them. . . .
After I took my physical examination and after I had taken the mental examination, I was given a status of 1-Y, which I understand means not to be called except in case of national emergency, and I never believed that my service in the military would be an issue.
Mr. Robinson: You have been a pacifist for some time, but why didn’t you make your position known, as a pacifist, when you were running for office in Georgia, and why didn’t you make your views on Vietnam known during the campaign?
Mr. Bond: My views on nonviolence were known during the campaign. The question of Vietnam is not a question that the Georgia House of Representatives, the office that I was aspiring to, addresses itself. I didn’t think it was an issue. . . .
Mr. Wicker: To be specific, would you see any striking similarity between the civil rights struggle in the United States in which you have been such an active participant and a revolutionary movement like that of the Viet Cong?
Mr. Bond: No, I don’t see that sort of similarity. I see a similarity between people—in one case, Negroes in the United States, in other cases people who live in Vietnam—who are struggling. That is one parallel. The other parallel is that Negroes in the United States are struggling against a system of segregation and discrimination and oppression, and the same sort of parallel has been suggested, not by me, as going on in Viet Nam, today. . . .
The feeling that I have is that people who live in Vietnam, North and South, are struggling to determine their own destiny in some way or another. The impression I get is that they would like very much to be left alone, not only by the United States but by the Viet Cong as well. . . .
Mr. Kaplow: How else do you equate civil rights with Vietnam? A lot of the other civil rights groups—for instance, the head of the Atlanta Chapter of NAACP—say that you shouldn’t equate the two.
Mr. Bond: I equate it. I think the opposition to the war in Vietnam in this country among a great many people is moral opposition. That is, it is not political opposition; it is opposition of people who feel that war is wrong. It is opposition of people who feel that that particular war is wrong on a moral ground. I think that is the same sort of opposition that the civil rights movement has been engaged in against segregation. It has been moral opposition to segregation as well as political and physical opposition to segregation. . . .
Mr. Scherer: Mr. Bond, I am wondering what you and your friends see as a central issue here in your difficulties with the legislature. Is it perhaps the right to dissent?
Mr. Bond: I think it is two important issues. First, it is certainly the right to free speech, the right of dissent, the right to voice an opinion that may be unpopular, but I think a second and equally as important an issue is the right of people—in this case, my constituents—to be represented by someone they chose, their right to make a free choice in a free election, to choose someone to represent them. I think in this instance that the Georgia House of Representatives has denied them that right. . . .
Mr. Robinson: Just one more thing. You indicated that you admired those individuals who burned their draft cards. Yet you said you wouldn’t burn yours. Why wouldn’t you?
Mr. Bond: Let me say what I said first. I said I admired the courage of people who burned their draft cards, because I understand, I think, why they do it, and I admire them for doing it, knowing that they face very heavy penalties, five years in jail, a fine of $5,000 and if they are in public office, they might be expelled. I wouldn’t burn mine, because it is against the law to burn mine.
Two days before the taping of Meet the Press, a federal district court held a hearing on the suit that Bond had filed against his most outspoken critic, House member Sloppy Floyd, and other state representatives. The court’s three judges—Elbert Tuttle, Griffin Bell, and Lewis Morgan—ruled 2-1 that Bond’s support of the SNCC statement provided rational grounds for the House’s conclusion that he could not faithfully swear to uphold the state and federal Constitutions. Bond appealed the ruling to the US Supreme Court, and on December 5, 1966, the Court unanimously ruled that Georgia had violated Bond’s right to free speech.
In the meantime, Bond had stayed in the race for the open seat in his district. He won the special election that was called shortly after the House had denied him his seat, and he also won the regular election held after that. Finally, on January 9, 1967, Bond took the oath of office and was seated in the House as the elected member of the 136th District. The House paid him $2,000 in back pay for service wrongfully denied.
Martin Luther King Jr. and Vietnam
Bond’s House colleagues were not openly hostile, but they were inclined to ignore him except when his vote was needed. He arranged for another legislator to introduce a bill that called for increasing the minimum wage to two dollars per hour. The bill failed to get out of committee, and Bond believed the same thing would happen to a bill seeking to repeal the right-to-work law, as well as to any bill introduced by a black House member.
Frustrated by his thwarted efforts in the House, Bond continued to comment on foreign policy matters, especially ones directly tied to the civil rights movement. As the letter below shows, Bond came to the defense of Martin Luther King Jr. after his now-famous April 4, 1967, speech against the Vietnam War received significant backlash. The letter echoes Bond’s earlier defense of the right to free speech and expounds on his stance on the war.
Dear Sir:
Articles and editorials appearing in the last two issues of the Atlanta Inquirer concerning Dr. Martin Luther King and his opposition to the war in Vietnam have disturbed me greatly.
I respect the Inquirer’s right to disagree with Dr. King’s position and with mine; I wonder, however, if the Atlanta Inquirer ought to align dissent with disloyalty as it has done in the last two issues.
To
