Civil rights legend dies
JULIAN BOND, a longtime board chairman of the NAACP and a civil rights activist often at the forefront of protests against segregation, has died. He was 75.
The veteran of the Georgia Legislature was as famous for his wit and telegenic personality as his serious work on behalf of social justice.
President 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.”
His death, after a brief illness in Fort Walton Beach, Fla., was announced Saturday night by the Southern Poverty Law Center, an advocacy organization he founded in 1971 and helped oversee for the rest of his life.
“You can use the term giant, champion, trailblazer — there’s just not enough adjectives in the English language to describe the life and career of Julian Bond,” said Doug Jones, a former U.S. attorney in Birmingham, Ala.
As a Morehouse College student, Bond helped found the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and as its communications director, he was on the front lines of protests that led to the nation’s landmark civil rights laws.
The son of a college president, he used that position to highlight examples of violence and discrimination against blacks in public facilities.
In 1968, he burst onto the national scene after he was nominated as a candidate for vice president by a delegation from Georgia at the Democratic National Convention. He declined, noting he was too young — 28 at the time.
On Sunday, Bond was remembered for his keen intellect and even keel, even in heated situations.
“When everybody else was getting worked up, I could find in Julian a cool serious analysis of what was going on,” Andrew Young, a former Georgia congressman and ambassador to the UN, told The Associated Press.
Bond moved seamlessly from being a charismatic protester to a long career in public office.
He 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 antiwar 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 framed the issues the best. He was called upon time and again to write it, to express it,” Eleanor Holmes Norton, a SNCC colleague of Bond’s, told The AP.
He served in the Georgia House until 1975, and then served six terms in the Georgia Senate until 1986.
Bond later became the board chairman of the 500,000-member NAACP. He held the position for 10 years but declined to run again for another one-year term in 2010.
He remained active in Democratic politics, made regular appearances on the lecture circuit and on television, and taught at several universities.
Bond “never took his eyes off the prize, and that was always racial equality,” his wife, Pamela Horowitz, said.
He is survived by Horowitz, a former staff attorney for the law center, and five children.