“Endlessly grateful for this collection of work that shows the expansive nature of Julian Bond’s ideas of black liberation, and how those ideas are woven into the fabric of both resistance and uplift. Race Man is the map of a journey that was not only struggle and not only triumph. It is revitalizing, now, to have this to reach for as a reminder that our fight was present long before this present moment, and will live on well beyond it. A reminder that in our taking to these struggles, we must care for the most marginalized among us. What a generous text, for how it injects history into our purpose.”—Hanif Abdurraqib, author of They Can’t Kill Us Until They Kill Us: Essays
“Race Man is the essential collection of Julian Bond’s wisdom—and required reading for the organizers and leaders who follow in his footsteps today.”—Marian Wright Edelman, president emerita, Children’s Defense Fund
“Julian Bond articulated, and modeled through his life of service, an idea of Black liberation that was expansive, principled, and pioneering. Race Man is a staggering collection that offers a genealogy of Bond’s freedom-oriented politics and soul work as captured in his written words. Race Man is a book that looks back and speaks forward. It is a timely example of what movement building can look like when servant leaders refuse to leave the most vulnerable out of their visions for Black freedom. We need that reminder, like never before, today.”—Darnell L. Moore, author of No Ashes in the Fire: Coming of Age Black and Free in America
“Julian Bond’s Race Man anthology offers a uniquely perceptive and cogent overview of the African American freedom struggle during its heyday in the 1960s and the perilous decades that have followed.”—Clayborne Carson, director, Martin Luther King Jr. Research and Education Institute, Stanford University
“The fight for civil rights has had many heroes, but, as these pages make clear, few have loomed as large as Julian Bond. Future generations will know Julian Bond as a warrior for good who helped conquer hate in the name of love. More importantly, they will live in a world that is far more just and far more equal because of him.”—Chad Griffin, former president of the Human Rights Campaign
Copyright © 2020 by Michael G. Long
All Rights Reserved.
Cover photo: “SNCC, headed by Julian Bond, Atlanta, Georgia, March 23, 1963” Photograph by Richard Avedon, © The Richard Avedon Foundation
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
[on file]
eISBN: 9780872867994
City Lights Books are published at the City Lights Bookstore, 261 Columbus Avenue, San Francisco, CA 94133
CONTENTS
The Fuel of My Civil Rights Fire
The Conversation That Started It All
Freedom Summer: What We Are Seeking
How to Remember the Atlanta Student Movement
SNCC: Alienated, Paranoid, and Near Collapse
Vietnam and the Politics of Dissent
Martin Luther King, Jr. and Vietnam
Elijah Muhammad and the 1968 Democratic National Convention
Eugene McCarthy and a New Politics
Rethinking Violence in America
Angela Davis Is a Political Prisoner
The Failure of Kent State
Lessons from Vietnam
The Population Bomb as Justification for Genocide
Escaping from Colonialism
The United States Is a Colonial Society
Liberation in Angola and Alabama
South Africa: The Cancer on the African Continent