keeping with a lifetime of “making the first outcry,” Julian was an early and passionate supporter of the equal rights of LGBT Americans, insisting that “LGBT rights are human rights.”8 Eventually, in May 2012, his influence would help the NAACP adopt a resolution in favor of marriage equality.
As President Obama said at the news of Julian’s death: “Julian Bond helped change this country for the better. And what better way to be remembered than that.”9
Julian wanted to be remembered with a bench, with “race man” on one side and “easily amused” on the other. To me, that captures Julian: he did the serious work of being a race man buoyed by having a sense of humor.
Julian also possessed an amazing intellect, sensitivity, grace, and elegance, not to mention incredible good looks. My marriage to him was the gift of a lifetime.
Julian and I went to the Supreme Court argument in Obergefell v. Hodges in April 2015, as guests of the Human Rights Campaign. We stood in line with Chad Griffin, our friend and HRC president, and Jim Obergefell, the plaintiff whose case we hoped would grant gays the right to marry. These hopes were realized on June 26, 2015, when the Court upheld marriage equality, saying: “No union is more profound than marriage, for it embodies the highest ideals of love, fidelity, devotion, sacrifice, and family. . . . In forming a marital union, two people become something greater than once they were. . . . Marriage embodies the love that endures even past death.”10
Julian would die less than two months later. The love endures.
August 2018
PREFACE
Practicing Dissent
Jeanne Theoharis
“What do you think about the Greensboro sit-in?” a fellow More-house student Lonnie King inquired [to then-twenty-year-old Julian Bond].
“I think it’s great!”
“Don’t you think it ought to happen here?” he asked.
“Oh, I’m sure it will happen here,” I responded. “Surely someone here will do it.”
Then to me, as it came to others in those early days in 1960, a query, an invitation, a command:
“Why don’t we make it happen here?”
I heard Julian Bond, one of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee’s founding members, tell this story countless times. He probably told it hundreds of times over the course of his life. It was not merely autobiographical in detailing how, as a college student, Bond came into civil rights activism. In the way he told it, he provided a lesson about how hard it is to step into social justice work. Like most of us, Bond admired courageous action but assumed someone else would take it forward; and then he realized his own power—and imperative—to act. In this story, in his graceful way, he holds a mirror to our collective tendencies to admire courage but stand on the sidelines.
Julian Bond died in 2015 at the age of seventy-five. While a student at Morehouse College, he had been a founding member and then communications director of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. SNCC’s courageous direct action transformed the systems of racial inequality in voting, jobs, schools, and public services in the South—and the ways local people saw their own power. Elected to the Georgia state legislature in 1965, Bond was then denied his seat because of his opposition to the Vietnam War; he fought and won it back twice and served for twenty years, first in the Georgia state house and then in the state senate. Continuing his commitment to social justice, he served as the first president of the Southern Poverty Law Center and as chairman of the NAACP. And for nearly 25 years, he also taught at Williams College, Drexel University, the University of Pennsylvania, Harvard University, American University, and the University of Virginia. The speeches and writings gathered here encompass much of that history.
Embedded in this personal story about helping to spearhead the Atlanta sit-in and many others he told about the civil rights movement were larger lessons about social justice, about how hard it is to take a step forward and the factors that lead people to see their own power and responsibility to do so. In many of these speeches, as he details the civil rights struggle from Atlanta to Jackson to Boston, Bond vividly underlines how real people had to make extremely difficult decisions. Despite the ways the civil rights movement is celebrated today, there was nothing inevitable or obvious about it. America wasn’t naturally moving toward justice. People chose, amid searing conditions, amid threats to their person and their livelihood, to make it happen.
The point of his lectures was not just to tell stories—though, of course, people could listen to those stories for days—but to impart broader insights about how history changes, about the nature of injustice and the forces that protect it, and about our role in challenging it. As this collection demonstrates, one prominent theme was the role of young people in pushing farther than their elders: “The student movement came about because young people saw many of their elders refusing to cope with segregation adequately. They saw other youngsters younger than they in Little Rock and other cities face mobs who would have deterred many a seasoned fighter. . . . They saw, finally, that it does no earthly good to talk and fret about segregation and that only action will enable man to talk of segregation as a thing of the past.”11 Bond reminds us how youth action was treated with fear and trepidation a half century ago, paralleling the ways young activists are treated today. “People in the press were always suspicious of us—they thought we were either communists or crazy kids—and because their concern was with brutality, with the big sensationalism. They weren’t interested in writing about the day-to-day work that SNCC was undergoing from 1961 through ’64 and ’65.”12 In other words, SNCC’s young organizers were treated as reckless and dangerous and going too far too fast, while at the same time the groundwork they were building in local communities was ignored—a parallel to how many commentators, politicians, and news outlets treat Black Lives Matter today.
Bond served as SNCC’s communications director—a position that furthered his belief that what is told and how it is told is crucial both to present-day mobilization and to the histories that will be preserved. Time and again, Bond tried to set the record straight. About the power of Fannie Lou Hamer and the refusal of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party to be kowtowed by their supposed allies: “When offered a dirty deal by high representatives of the Democratic Party in Atlantic City in 1964, she turned them down flat, saying ‘We didn’t come for no two seats, ’cause all of us is tired.’”13 About the transformation of the War on Poverty to a War Seeking to Uplift (and Chastise) the Poor: “But the worst damage was done when the victim was made to feel part of the crime, when the people wronged were told to set themselves right, when the federal government began a hasty and undignified withdrawal from its role as protector of the poor.”14 Bond was clear that one of the most effective weapons in maintaining injustice was to make people feel like they were the problem and to make others comfortable in asserting that these “cultural” behaviors and values (and not racism) were the problem.
Bond didn’t mince words, calling for “reparations to the tune of $15 a nigger” to be used for a land bank, publishing house, welfare rights and a host of other social initiatives. Describing black people’s “colonial” status, he noted, “It didn’t take a Kerner Report for black people to discover that white people were our problem, and not we theirs.”15
He maintained his sharp engagement in the 1980s, 1990s, and 2000s, engaging with a variety
