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 Southern black youths of my generation, my path to the civil rights movement extended from my college experience. 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