of these mistakes, the movement has flourished across the land, meeting and surmounting obstacles which were considered too difficult to surmount or situations beyond our control.
We learned that we must reemphasize the philosophies which have built the movement, not because we have begun to stray away but because continued emphasis will serve to make us more effective in the battle. Nonviolence is our weapon and our defense. We must clasp it to us.
We learned what so many of us had begun to realize. We learned that greater sacrifice is needed, that our dedication must be strengthened, that our programs must spread and cover the entirety of segregation. We must not settle for freedom at lunch counters. As have Atlanta and so many other protest centers, we must carry the battle to the enemy and attack him whether he lurks behind the restrictive covenant in real estate, behind the closed door at the employment office, if he manages to close the voting booth, or if he is able to direct us to the back door of the movie theater. Until all men can move freely, the beloved community will not exist. Until no man can restrict the liberties of another in a capricious and arbitrary fashion by using his color as a point of reference in choosing or refusing him, we must press onward and upward.
We learned the importance of sacrifice. As James Lawson, a student who was expelled from Vanderbilt Divinity School in Nashville for his part in the student protest movement, told the conference: “We lost the finest hour of the movement when so many of us left the jails of the South.” Lawson urged the students arrested for their participation in sit-in activity to stay in jail and told them to tell the leaders who asked them to accept bail and come home, “We can stand it in here just as long as you can stand it out there.”
Attending the conference was like having a breath of fresh air blown into a hot and stuffy room. I saw white students from northern colleges, whose only experience with discrimination must always necessarily be secondhand, ready to dedicate themselves far beyond the sacrifices which many Negro students, deeply touched by the evil in their daily lives, have refused to offer.
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 that too often one person cries against wrongdoing, and one person cannot effectively act. They saw that ponderous Negroes were being raised to fight the 1954 Supreme Court decision, and they saw that only a massive attack could bring results. They saw that massive resistance must be met with passive insistence, and they saw that only in a movement which involved all of the people involved or in any way connected with the tense problem could any sort of effective change be wrought. 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.
Lonnie King Is an Acid Victim
Responsible for reporting on student activities, Bond gave favorable coverage to COAHR and the larger student movement. Below is an example of one of his news reports—this one appeared in the Pittsburgh Courier in 1961—about an attack on his good friend Lonnie King.
Even though he was almost blinded by acid flung in his face, student leader Lonnie King has vowed that his anti-segregation activities will continue.
King, a Morehouse College senior, is chairman of the Committee on Appeal for Human Rights (COAHR), the student group here that has been leading the fight against Jim Crow since March 1960.
An unidentified white man threw the liquid, identified in a Grady Hospital report as “acid,” in King’s face while the young integration leader was walking in a picket line before Mann Brothers grocery store here.
King asked police officers D. C. Taylor and D. S. James, who arrived on the scene shortly after the incident occurred, to take him to a hospital, but they replied, “Take a bus.”
Another police officer, Lieut. Strickland, later told them to take King to Grady Hospital for emergency treatment.
A doctor at the hospital told King that “if he had not been wearing sunglasses,” his eyes certainly would have been damaged.
The hospital report said that “acid was thrown into the patient’s face.”
It was so powerful it took paint off the picket sign he was wearing. Student leader Charles Black said that “after the incident, police left the scene.” Bystanders filled the area despite police warnings that gatherings would not be tolerated.
Black, who was marching behind King in the picket line, said that the assailant had been standing near a phone booth for some time before he threw the acid.
Black said that the man finally walked up to King, threw the acid, and ran away.
King immediately threw off his sign, and ran across the street to a Gulf Oil service station and asked for water to soothe his burns.
He was refused and walked a block farther to a Shell service station where he was given water and a chance to use a telephone. After calling COAHR headquarters, he returned to his place on the picket line.
Black said that hecklers who had been standing outside the store “all had disappeared when the acid was thrown. We noticed them inside the store laughing.”
King said that he felt as though “someone had poured gasoline on me and set it on fire.” COAHR headquarters immediately called Grady Hospital and requested an ambulance, which arrived about one-half hour after King left in the police car.
Atlanta’s college students, who had been picketing the store in an attempt to secure better jobs for Negroes, have been subjected to heckling, stone throwing, cursing, and pushing by white onlookers.
A survey conducted by a national soap manufacturer revealed that at least 50 percent of the store’s customers are Negroes.
Police questioned King extensively about the incident, and even returned him to COAHR headquarters after he was released from the hospital.
They turned his shirt over to their crime lab in an attempt to discover the nature of the acid.
Students indicated that “it would take more than a little acid to keep us from doing what we know is right.”
The Murder of Louis Allen
The year 1961 proved considerably stressful for young Bond. His work with COAHR and the Inquirer was consuming, and his new marriage to Spelman student Alice Clopton brought its own responsibilities. Feeling overwhelmed, Bond resigned from his editorial work at the Inquirer in late summer to become the executive secretary of COAHR. Bond also withdrew from Morehouse College, though he was on track to graduate at the end of the academic year.
But thanks to James Forman, a charismatic leader Bond later identified as among the most influential in his life, 1961 also proved to be a pivotal year for the budding civil rights activist. Not long after Forman became SNCC’s executive secretary in the fall of 1961, he asked Bond to begin working on publicity for the organization. Bond agreed, and, before long, SNCC hired him to be communications director, paying him a modest salary. Bond professionalized SNCC’s newsletter, the Student Voice, and reported on the organization’s work in desegregation campaigns and in grassroots voter registration efforts in the Deep South.
Bond later characterized himself as a bureaucrat, an “office functionary,” someone far removed
