such engagement. He was scathing about Reagan’s wide-ranging attacks on the poor and civil rights. His ideas evolved—from placing women’s and gay rights as somewhat apart from black issues to becoming an adamant champion of gay rights and seeing their interlocking nature. At one point in 1977, he critiqued some of the behaviors of black young people, but that theme does not reappear again in his speeches, perhaps because he saw the dangerous ways such a critique could be misused. Bond read and reflected. He learned and learned some more, writing op-eds, joining picket lines, and standing with movements across the United States. He was still in the fight till the end, embodying Rosa Parks’s belief that “freedom fighters never retire.”
The last time I saw Julian Bond in a political context was at the 50th anniversary of Freedom Summer in Jackson, Mississippi, in June 2014. He was on a panel with current activists from the immigrant rights DREAMer movement as well as the criminal justice oriented DREAM Defender movement. Unlike some of his generation who sought to instruct young people on the “right” way to do things, Bond relished that youthful energy and drive. Like SNCC’s mentor Ella Baker, he saw student militancy as essential, remembering how they too had made people scared and wary.
That spirit of identification and encouragement came through in his teaching and in the lectures he did at many colleges. Vann Newkirk recalled Bond’s visit to his class at Morehouse College in a piece in the Atlantic, “He told us that while the enemy—racism—was the same, the battlefield had changed. To carry on the movement, we would have to be modern warriors. We would have to adapt and innovate for the times. Maybe we would have to let go of some of the respectability, he said. . . . There’s one line I remember verbatim: ‘A nice suit is a nice suit. Get one,’ he told us. ‘But it won’t stop a bullet, son.’”16 From Bond, Newkirk saw the continuities and lineages between the black freedom struggle of the 1960s and Black Lives Matter today—and the ways public memory of the civil rights movement distorted it to make it seem at odds. To the end of his life, Bond sided with young people, trusting them to find their own way forward and standing with their vision and spirit.
Forty-four years before the election of Donald Trump, Bond observed, “If the election of November 7th illuminated any political movement at all, it was the movement of the comfortable, the callous, and the smug closing their ranks, and their hearts, against the claims and calls to conscience put forward by the forgotten and underrepresented elements in American society. . . . There is something wrong with an election that sees one candidate receiving nearly all of the black votes cast, and the other candidate receiving more than three-quarters of the white votes cast.”17
His words continue to be prescient today—reminding us that what we face today has been faced by others before us, and reminding us of the tools they used to challenge it. As does his example of refusing to stand on the sidelines in these dangerous days. “We must practice dissent now,” he insisted.18 Young people will lead the way.
INTRODUCTION
Michael G. Long
I first met Julian Bond when he agreed to be interviewed for a book project about Martin Luther King Jr. and gay rights. My hope was to secure a comment on Bernice King’s anti-gay preaching and her claim that her father, Martin Luther King Jr., “did not take a bullet for same-sex unions.”19
We met for lunch in a busy restaurant near his home in the leafy northwest section of Washington, DC. He was nattily dressed, as usual, and caught the attention of several patrons, women and men, as we walked to our seats.
In preparation for our time together, I discovered that Bond, unlike other civil rights leaders like Walter Fauntroy and Fred Shuttlesworth, had argued for a number of years that gay rights were civil rights. “Of course they are,” he often said. “Civil rights are positive legal prerogatives—the right to equal treatment before the law. These rights are shared by all. There is no one in the United States who does not—or should not—share these rights.”20
Indeed, there was no other African American leader from the 1960s who so closely tied the black civil rights movement to the LGBTQ+ movement. Bond conceded that the two movements were not exactly parallel: queer people do not have a history identical to slavery, and it’s people of color who mostly “carry the badge of who we are on our faces.” But Bond maintained that the thread connecting the two was discrimination based on immutable characteristics. While his appeal to biological essentialism is now dated, it was common among social liberals of his era. “Science has demonstrated conclusively that sexual disposition is inherent in some; it’s not an option or alternate they’ve selected,” he said. “In that regard it exactly parallels race. . . . Like race, our sexuality isn’t a preference. It’s immutable, unchangeable.”21
That was an unpopular position among conservative black ministers, many in the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), who regularly wielded biblical passages to condemn homosexuality as an immoral and sinful lifestyle choice. But Bond was insistent. “If your religion tells you that gay people shouldn’t get married in your church, that’s fine with me,” he said. “Just don’t let them get married in your church. But don’t stop them from getting married in city hall.” Marriage is a civil right granted by the government, not a religious right granted by churches, and religious believers “ought not to force their laws on people of different faiths or people of no faith at all.”22
Bond also argued that his position was in line with the trajectory of King’s civil rights work. “I believe in my heart of hearts that were King alive today, he would be a supporter of gay rights,” Bond said. “He would see this as just another in a series of battles of justice and fair play against injustice and bigotry. He would make no distinction between this fight [for gay rights] and the fight he became famous for.”23
Bernice King disagreed with that point, and Bond was well aware of her views. In her 1996 book, Hard Questions, Heart Answers, King had written, “Gay men aren’t real men”; they were to blame for “the present plight of our nation.”24 King continued to express her antigay theology when she joined Bishop Eddie Long’s ministerial staff at New Birth Missionary Baptist Church in Atlanta. In 2004, she and the bishop—who had long depicted gay sex as unnatural—traveled to New Zealand to offer their support to a church movement seeking the defeat of a civil union bill that would have extended legal recognition and rights to gay and lesbian couples. It was during this trip when she delivered her most memorable line to date: “I know deep down in my sanctified soul that he [Martin Luther King, Jr.] did not take a bullet for same-sex unions.”25
I asked Bond about that claim, suspecting he would either offer a bit of gentle criticism or simply sidestep the question. But Bond’s genteel manners, smooth voice, and sartorial splendor belied the ferocity of his reply.
“I don’t think you can call her anything except a homophobe,” he said. “You can say she’s mistaken or uneducated or not as well-versed in things as she might be, but she’s just wrong on this. And there’s one word for that—homophobe. She’s homophobic.”26
He then launched into a lengthy criticism, faulting King for refusing to read, let alone learn from, her father’s papers, and for choosing instead to follow Bishop Long and his homophobic preaching. Although he spoke in a quiet and mellifluous tone, it was clear that Bond was disgusted and angered by what he depicted as Bernice’s perversion of her father’s legacy.
That’s when I realized that I wanted to study Julian Bond. When I heard him passionately condemn Bernice King’s truncated vision of her father’s inclusive ministry, when I watched him lean forward to emphasize that the black civil rights movement was expansive rather than static, when I saw his eyes light up when
