Julian Bond: Civil Rights Activist

Since his college days, Julian Bond has been an active participant in the movements for civil rights, economic justice, and peace, and an aggressive spokesman for the disinherited. As an activist who has faced jail for his convictions, as a veteran of more than twenty years of service in the Georgia General Assembly, as a writer, teacher, and lecturer, Bond has been on the cutting edge of social change since he was a college student leading sit-in demonstrations in Atlanta in 1960.

Born in Nashville, Tennessee in January, 1940, Julian Bond graduated from the George School, a co-educational Quaker school in Bucks County, Pennsylvania in 1957 and entered Morehouse College in Atlanta that same year. While at Morehouse, Bond helped to found a

literary magazine called The Pegasus, and was an intern for Time Magazine.

While still a student, Bond was a founder in 1960 of the Committee On Appeal for Human Rights (COHAR), the Atlanta University Center student civil rights organization that directed three years of non-violent, anti-segregation protests that won integration of Atlanta's movie theatres, lunch counters, and parks. Bond was arrested for sitting-in at the then segregated cafeteria at Atlanta City Hall.

He was one of several hundred students from across the South who helped to form the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) on Easter Weekend, 1960, and shortly thereafter became SNCC's Communications Director. He worked in voter registration drives in rural Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, and Arkansas. In 1961 he joined the staff of a new weekly newspaper, The Atlanta Inquirer. He later became the paper's managing editor.

Bond was first elected in1965 to a one-year term in the Georgia House Of Representatives in a special election following court-ordered reapportionment of the legislature, but members of the House voted not to seat him because of his outspoken opposition to the war in Vietnam. Bond won a second election, to fill his vacant seat in 1966, and again the Georgia House voted to bar him from membership. He won a third election, this time for a two-year term, in November, 1966 and in December, the United States Supreme Court ruled unanimously that the Georgia House had violated Bond's rights in refusing him his seat. He was elected to the State Senate in 1974. When he left the office in January, 1987, Bond had been elected to public office more than any other Black Georgian, living or dead.

Bond served four terms in the House and six terms in the Senate, ending his tenure only when an unsuccessful congressional race in 1986 prevented him from seeking re-election to the Senate.

During his service in the Georgia Assembly, Bond was sponsor or co-sponsor of more than 60 bills which became law, including a pioneer sickle cell anemia testing program, authorization of a minority set-aside program for Fulton County, and a state-wide program providing low-interest home loans to low-income Georgians. He waged a successful

two-year fight in the legislature and the courts to create a majority Black congressional district in Atlanta and organized the Georgia Legislative Black Caucus, then the nation's largest.

In 1968, Bond was Co-Chairman of the Georgia Loyal National Delegation to the Democratic Convention. The Loyalists, an insurgent group, were successful in unseating the hand-picked regulars, and Bond was nominated for Vice-President of the United States, the first Black to be so honored by a major political party. He withdrew his name because he was too young to serve.

Bond was President and Founder of the Southern Elections Fund (SEF), an early political action committee which aided in the elections of rural Southern Black candidates.

Bond has served on the national board of directors of the NAAACP and on the boards of many other civil rights organizations. He was resident of the Atlanta NAACP from 1978 until 1989, and served on the Executive Committee of the Association For The Study Of Afro-American Life And History. He is President Emeritus of the Southern Poverty Law Center and is a member of the Commission on United States-African Relations Of The

International Center For Development Policy.

A television and radio commentator, Bond has been a narrator/host for several documentaries about the struggle for civil rights, including the Westinghouse (Group W) series "Rush Toward Freedom," the critically acclaimed 1987 and 1990 PBS series, "Eyes On The Prize," and "Where Once We Stood," produced by the University of Alabama for Alabama Public Television in 1989, a 1989 PBS show on the life of New York Congressman Adam Clayton Powell, and a 1991 film on the life of artist Henry Ossawa Tanner.

A collection of Bond's essays has been published under the title A Time To Speak, A Time To Act. He is the author of Black Candidates - Southern Campaign Experiences. His poems and articles have appeared in a number of national magazines.

Bond has taught at the University of Pennsylvania, Drexel niversity, Harvard University, the University of Virginia, and American University.