I grew up on black college campuses. My father, the late Dr. Horace Mann Bond, was president of Fort Valley State College for Negroes in Georgia and Lincoln University in Lincoln, Pennsylvania. From 1957 on I lived in university housing owned by Atlanta University, where my father ended his career as dean of the School of Education. Local and state racial policies often froze the black college, its faculty and administrators and students, into political inactivity and grudging acceptance of the status quo. The best of schools did, however, keep alive the rich tradition of protest and rebellion that had existed throughout black communities since slavery.
This was my experience at Fort Valley and Lincoln, and in Atlanta. At the age of 3, I posed with my sister Jane, my father, and noted black scholars E. Franklin Frazier and W. E. B. Du Bois while the elders pledged us to a life of scholarship. At seven, I sat at the knee of the great black singer and political activist Paul Robeson as he sang of the Four Insurgent Generals. I watched as NAACP Executive Secretary Walter White visited the Lincoln Campus, escorted by an impressive phalanx of black-booted Pennsylvania state troopers whose shiny motorcycles were surely designed to attract the attention of small boys and impress them with the importance of the white-looking black man whom they protected. When my father came to Atlanta University, I entered Morehouse College, the alma mater of Martin Luther King Jr. and Sr. Both Kings and a long list of race men and women, dedicated to the uplift of their people, were paraded before us in daily, required sessions of morning chapel.
But school alone did not fuel my civil rights fires; my father’s house and my mother’s table served daily helpings of current events, involving the world and the race. The race’s problems and achievements were part of everyday discussion. When a fourteen-year-old named Emmett Till was kidnapped, beaten, castrated, and murdered in Mississippi, it terrified the fifteen-year-old me. I asked myself, “If they will do that to him, what won’t they do to me?”
The Conversation That Started It All
In this account of the beginning of the Atlanta student movement, Bond refers to Ella Baker, who moved to Atlanta in 1958 to help direct the Southern Christian Leadership Conference’s (SCLC) Crusade for Citizenship and its work in registering African American voters.
“Strong people don’t need strong leaders,” Ella Baker told us; we were strong people. We did strong things. I want to talk about some of the things we did.
It began for me as it did for many more.
About February 4, 1960, I was sitting in a café near my college campus in Atlanta, Georgia, a place where students went between or instead of classes.
A student name Lonnie King approached me. He held up a copy of that day’s Atlanta Daily World, Atlanta’s daily black newspaper. The headline read: “Greensboro Students Sit-in for Third Day!”
The story told, in exact detail, how black college students from North Carolina A&T University in Greensboro had, for the third day in a row, entered a Woolworth’s Department Store and asked for service at the whites-only lunch counter. It described their demeanor, their dress, and their determination to return the following day—and as many successive days as it took—if they were not served.
“Have you seen this?” he demanded.
“Yes, I have,” I replied.
“What do you think about it?” he inquired.
“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?”
He and I and Joe Pierce canvassed the café, talking to students, inviting them to discuss the Greensboro event and to duplicate it in Atlanta. The Atlanta student movement had begun.
With our recruited schoolmates we formed an organization, reconnoitered downtown lunch counters, and within a few weeks, 77 of us had been arrested.
After Lonnie King had recruited him, Bond joined forces with King and Pierce to invite their peers at Morehouse and other schools in the Atlanta University Center (Atlanta University, the Interdenominational Theological Center, and Clark, Morehouse, Morris Brown, and Spelman Colleges) to organize a series of sit-ins targeting segregated lunch counters and restaurants in the downtown area. Reports of the plans spread quickly, and the various school presidents asked the young activists to begin their efforts by first seeking cooperation from the wider community with a public appeal. The students agreed, and Bond and Spelman student Roslyn Pope penned “An Appeal for Human Rights,” a statement protesting racial discrimination in Atlanta that concluded with a promise to act. “We must say in all candor,” Pope and Bond wrote, “that we plan to use every legal and nonviolent means at our disposal to secure full citizenship rights as members of this great democracy of ours.”
The Appeal was published in city newspapers on March 9. The sit-ins began on March 15 at taxpayer-supported lunch counters, restaurants, and cafeterias. Although Bond was frightened by the prospect of landing in jail—Emmett Till was front and center in his thoughts—he led his assigned group of student protesters to the Atlanta City Hall cafeteria. A cafeteria worker called the police, and they soon transported the students to jail. It was Bond’s first arrest.
A Student Voice
While Lonnie King served as chairman of the Committee on Appeal for Human Rights (COAHR), the organization that directed the Atlanta student movement, Bond worked on publicity, writing and editing a publication called The Student Movement and You.
In April 1960 Bond and other COAHR delegates attended a conference for student activists on the campus of Shaw University in Raleigh, North Carolina. Called together by Ella Baker, the students eventually agreed to establish a permanent organization that would coordinate their various protests in the South. Heeding Baker’s advice that they not align themselves with already established civil rights groups, the students created the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee as an independent entity committed to nonviolent direct action, especially grassroots campaigns to empower local black communities. In June 1960, SNCC issued its first publication, the Student Voice, and Bond contributed the following two pieces, the first of which reveals his early passion for writing poetry.
I, too, hear America singing
But from where I stand
I can only hear Little Richard
And Fats Domino.
But sometimes,
I hear Ray Charles
Drowning in his own tears
Or Bird
Relaxing at Camarillo
Or Horace Silver doodling,
Then I don’t mind standing
a little longer.
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