Julian Bond, Civil Rights Giant, Dies at 75

Photo courtesy of LBJ Foundation/Flickr.

By GREG HAMBRICK

Julian Bond, a giant in the civil rights movement including during a 12-year stint as chairman of the NAACP, died Saturday in Fort Walton Beach, Fla. He was 75.

Bond strived for racial equality his entire life, beginning as a co-founder of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee in the 1960s. He was the founding president of the Southern Poverty Law Center in the 1970s and would go on to serve as chairman of the NAACP from 1998 until 2010.

Bond also had a 20-year career in the Georgia legislature, with four terms in the House of Representatives and six terms in the Georgia Senate.

Morris Dees, co-founder and chief trial attorney of the Southern Poverty Law Center, said in a statement that the country has lost one of its most passionate and eloquent voices for the cause of 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. “Not only has the country lost a hero today, we’ve lost a great friend.”

Atlanta Mayor Kasim Reed said Sunday that the city mourned Bond, a civil rights hero and impassioned advocate for non-violence.

“We may take comfort in knowing his legacy lives on in his children and grandchildren, in the organizations he founded and in the barriers he broke,” Reed said in a statement. “Julian Bond changed our state and our country, and we are forever in his debt.”

Bond is survived by his wife, Pamela Horowitz, and five children.

A photo of Bond at a 1968 civil-rights rally in Bed-Stuy, Brooklyn, circulated with news of his death. And politicians in New York City, where Bond made many appearances and important speeches over the years, payed their respects on social media on Sunday.

A Lifetime Striving for Civil Rights

As a young man, Bond helped to build a network of opposition to segregation in Atlanta and several southern states. As the New York Times’ Roy Reed notes, Bond’s “wit, cool personality and youthful face became familiar to millions of television viewers during the 1960s and 1970s; he was described as dashing, handsome and urbane.”

Bond was elected to the Georgia legislature in 1965, but white members refused to seat him, claiming it was due to his opposition to the Vietnam War. A unanimous Supreme Court in 1966 ordered that he be seated, and he would go on to serve two decades.

In recent years, Bond continued to speak on the challenges that face African-Americans, including a Virginia event in 2013 on Martin Luther King Jr.’s birthday.

“Black people have struggled to find answers to a series of questions. ‘Who or what is the enemy?’ ‘Who are our friends?’ Unlike Italian or Irish Americans, African Americans remain the indigestible alternative. Unlike the others, they refuse to agree to white supremacy. Unlike the others, black ethnic mobilization has also been demeaned as identity politics.

Bond was also an advocate in the struggles of other communities, including fights for same-sex marriage and employment protections for the LGBT community. He would frequently note that “gay rights are civil rights.”

In an op-ed in Politico in 2013, Bond spoke of ”America’s promise of equality.”

Today, discrimination against individuals based on their race, sex, national origin, age or disability is almost universally viewed as unacceptable. That is because people of goodwill came together to make it so. At this critical moment in history, we should also come together to make clear that our LGBT brothers and sisters deserve full equality under the law, not just 80 percent. I believe in America’s promise of equality under the law for all. I hope that Americans from across the political spectrum will stand with me.