Julian Bond, former NAACP chairman and activist, dies at 75
|
| FILE-
In this July 8, 2007, file photo shows NAACP Chairman Julian Bond
addresses the civil rights organization's annual convention in Detroit.
Bond, a civil rights activist and longtime board chairman of the NAACP,
died Saturday, Aug. 15, 2015, according to the Southern Poverty Law
Center. He was 75. |
ATLANTA (AP)
-- Julian Bond's life traced the arc of the civil rights movement, from
his efforts as a militant young man to start a student protest group all
the way to the top leadership post at the NAACP.
Year
after year, the calm, telegenic Bond was one of the nation's most
poetic voices for equality, inspiring fellow activists with his words in
the 1960s and sharing the movement's vision with succeeding generations
as a speaker and academic. He died Saturday at 75.
Former Ambassador Andrew Young said Bond's legacy would be as a "lifetime struggler."
"He
started when he was about 17 and he went to 75," Young said. "And I
don't know a single time when he was not involved in some phase of the
civil rights movement."
Bond died in Fort
Walton Beach, Florida, after a brief illness, according to a statement
issued Sunday by the Southern Poverty Law Center, an advocacy group that
he founded in 1971 and helped oversee for the rest of his life. His
wife, Pamela Horowitz, said Bond suffered from vascular disease.
Her husband, she said, "never took his eyes off the prize and that was always racial equality."
The
son of a college president burst into the national consciousness after
helping to start the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee, where
he rubbed shoulders with committee leaders Stokely Carmichael and John
Lewis. As the committee grew into one of the movement's most important
groups, the young Bond dropped out of Morehouse College in Atlanta to
serve as communications director. He later returned and completed his
degree in 1971.
Bond was elected to the
Georgia House of Representatives in 1965, but fellow lawmakers, many of
them white, refused to let him take his seat because of his anti-war
stance on Vietnam. The case went all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court,
which ruled in his favor. Bond finally took office in 1967.
"If
this was another movement, they would call him the PR man, because he
was the one who wrote the best, who framed the issues the best. He was
called upon time and again to write it, to express it," said Eleanor
Holmes Norton, who was Bond's colleague on the student committee and
later wrote a friend-of-the-court brief for the American Civil Liberties
Union when Bond's case was before the high court.
President Barack Obama called Bond "a hero."
"Justice
and equality was the mission that spanned his life," Obama said in a
statement. "Julian Bond helped change this country for the better."
In
1968, he led a delegation to the Democratic National Convention, where
his name was placed in nomination for the vice presidency, but he
declined because he was too young.
He served
in the Georgia House until 1975 and then served six terms in the Georgia
Senate until 1986. He also served as president of the law center from
its founding until 1979 and was later on its board of directors.
Bond was elected board chairman of the NAACP in 1998 and served for 10 years.
He was known for his intellect and his even keel, even in the most emotional situations, Young said.
"When everybody else was getting worked up, I could find in Julian a cool serious analysis of what was going on," Young said.
In the most intense debates, Bond was "always a gentleman" and never mean, his wife said.
Bond
was often at the forefront of protests. In 1960, he helped organize a
sit-in involving Atlanta college students at the city hall cafeteria.
"We
never thought that he really would participate and be arrested because
he was always so laid back and cool, but he joined in with us," recalled
Carolyn Long Banks, now 74, who said Bond never sought much recognition
in those early years.
Bond was "a thinker as
well as a doer. He was a writer as well as a young philosopher," said
Charlayne Hunter-Gault, a journalist who struck up a friendship with
Bond in the early 1960s, when she was one of the first two black
students to attend the University of Georgia. At the time, Bond was an
activist in Atlanta with the newly formed committee.
His eloquence and sense of humor "really helped sustain the young people in the civil rights movement."
Hunter-Gault
said she hopes a new generation of activists draws lessons from Bond's
life and work as they embrace the Black Lives Matter movement.
"Everybody
is not going to be out there in the street with their hands up or
shouting," she said. "There've got to be people like Julian who
participate and observe and combine those two things for action and
change that make a difference."
Morris Dees, co-founder of the law center, said the nation lost one of its most passionate voices for justice.
"He
advocated not just for African-Americans but for every group, indeed
every person subject to oppression and discrimination, because he
recognized the common humanity in us all," Dees said.
After
leading the NAACP, Bond stayed active in Democratic politics. He also
made regular appearances on the lecture circuit and on television and
taught at several universities.
Horace Julian
Bond was born Jan. 14, 1940, in Nashville, Tennessee. In addition to his
wife, a former staff attorney at the law center, survivors include five
children.
.
