that progressive movements often claimed the mantle of the civil rights movement—that’s when I told myself that I had to dig into the life and legacy of Julian Bond. It took some time, but this book represents the culmination of my efforts to make good on that conviction.
The next time I contacted Bond was in 2012, when I asked him to write the foreword to I Must Resist: The Life and Letters of Bayard Rustin. He accepted the invitation without hesitation and, true to form, penned a clear, concise, and compelling piece. “I knew Bayard Rustin; he was a commanding and charismatic figure,” he wrote. “I was taken by his platform personality, his way with words, and his ability to persuade.”27 When I read those words today, they call to mind not only Rustin but also Bond himself. Like Rustin, Bond was a commanding and charismatic figure; even a cursory review of his many video interviews will reveal as much. Like Rustin, “the intellectual bank” of the civil rights movement, Bond was a personal think tank to whom various human rights advocates would turn for wisdom and strategic thinking. Like Rustin’s, Bond’s way with words, polished early on by black church and Quaker educators, was characterized by clear thinking, deliberate pacing, prophetic content, and intersectional analysis.
I returned to my idea of studying Bond’s life and legacy in the early days of the Trump presidency, while I was working on a book about nonviolent resistance in US history. Bond’s name kept popping up, especially in the period in which the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee issued its statement opposing the Vietnam War and calling for freedom fighters to engage in battle against racial injustice. After Bond had announced his support for the controversial statement, racist members of the Georgia state legislature, with support from the state’s white media, denied him his elected seat in the house chambers. It was a very low point in US political history, and not unlike the one in which we now find ourselves—a time when antidemocratic leaders seek to crush peaceful dissenters who dream of equal justice for all.
Revisiting the racist attempts to squelch Bond, I thought it would be helpful to resurrect Bond’s voice for our present struggle against the racist forces of injustice. I knew I had made the right choice when I began my research of his papers at the University of Virginia. In the early days of my research, to tell the truth, I did not know a whole lot about Bond other than the basic information available in numerous civil rights books: he was the son of the famous African American educator, Horace Mann Bond; he worked in communications for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee; he was denied his seat in the Georgia House of Representatives; he was nominated to be the Democratic candidate for vice president while he was still too young to serve in the office; he was elected as a state representative and senator; he lost his bid to become a US representative to John Lewis; and he served as the chair of the NAACP. I also knew that Bond had narrated Eyes on the Prize, the award-winning documentary about the black civil rights movement and its monumental legacy. In fact, there were few things I enjoyed more as a professor than introducing my students to Bond’s moving descriptions of the movement’s nonviolent foot soldiers who overcame nightmarish obstacles between them and the “beloved community” of Martin Luther King Jr.’s dream.
What I did not know as I began my research was that Bond had carefully documented his own work in the black civil rights movement and his relentless efforts to steer the movement from protest to politics and to connect it to evolving movements for the rights of women, the poor, the elderly, prisoners of color, prisoners on death row, victims of police brutality, black Africans, and those with special needs, among others. What I didn’t know was that no one from the black civil rights movement, not even Reverend Jesse Jackson, had sought more consistently and doggedly to establish solid connections between the black civil rights movement and the many progressive movements it sometimes unpredictably inspired. And I learned too that Bond’s numerous papers included radio commentaries, newspaper op-eds, syndicated columns, letters, notes, television interviews, oral history interviews, and other means of communication, many of them explaining in no uncertain terms his progressive positions on virtually every significant human rights issue that needed attention during his lifetime.
This book is not a biography. It’s a collection of Bond’s works, both written and spoken, that address the most important issues and events of the latter half of the twentieth century and the beginning of the twenty-first. Also included in this collection are his assessments of the major contemporaneous political personalities.
Bond’s works are not merely things of the past; they’re living and breathing, fresh and refreshing, and ripe for picking. If there’s anything that his words reveal without qualification, it’s that Julian Bond was one of the most eloquent and brilliant leaders of the resistance, that is, the evershifting group of political activists who oppose anyone and anything that undermines equal justice under law. The lasting power of Bond’s contribution lies in his ideas about strategies for resistance, ways to build what King called “the beloved community,” and to make the connections we need to make as we resist and build in the post-King years.
I have edited Bond’s works with a light hand, editing a few grammatical errors here and there and cutting thoughts that veer from his main points. I have also excluded those pieces that bear his name as author but were clearly penned by others. In the few cases where I have included those rare pieces penned by individuals who helped him write speeches or articles, I have made it a point to indicate co-authorship. Nevertheless, I can state with confidence that the great majority of selections included in this book offer us Bond’s unfiltered voice—an inspiring, instructive voice that warns us of bigots while imploring us to build communities that embody and enact the spirit of the civil rights movement and all the human rights movements that Bond embraced with such energy and enthusiasm.
I should note that language usage has necessarily changed since the time of Julian Bond’s writing. And while many terms Bond used would be deemed unacceptable by today’s standards, I’ve decided to keep his exact wording intact as to best reflect the historical record and the available vocabulary used to describe social conditions during his lifetime.
CHAPTER ONE
The Atlanta Movement and SNCC
The Fuel of My Civil Rights Fire
In this recounting of some of his early influences, Bond does not mention the George School, a coeducational Quaker boarding school in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, from which he graduated before enrolling at Morehouse College in Atlanta in 1957. But he did state at other points that the Quaker tenets of nonviolence, speaking truth to power, egalitarianism, and collective decision-making molded him for a life in the civil rights movement. The teachings of his father, Horace Mann Bond, were no less formative, and Bond was told that he had a responsibility to use his education for the betterment of those in need.
In the following text, Bond refers to the scholar and activist E. Franklin Frazier, the first African American president of the American Sociological Association; W. E. B. Du Bois, a founder of the Niagara Movement, a civil rights advocacy group that eventually gave rise to the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP); Walter White, who led the NAACP from 1931 to 1955; and Paul Robeson, the famous singer, actor, and activist.
Bond also cites the case of Emmett Till, a fourteen-year-old from Chicago who was lynched in Mississippi while on a visit to family. A few days after Till allegedly offended a white woman, the woman’s husband and his half-brother abducted Till from his uncle’s home, beating and mutilating him before shooting him in the head and dumping his body in the Tallahatchie River. The horribly disfigured body was discovered three days later, and was sent north to Chicago, where his mother insisted on a public funeral service with an open casket. Tens of thousands attended his funeral or viewed his open casket, and images of Emmett Till’s mutilated body were published in magazines and newspapers.
Like many
