His soft, demure voice would never reverberate across the landscape like so many others raised during this nation’s long, arduous struggle with civil rights.
But if others often provided the soundtrack, it was Julian Bond who routinely provided the words.
Poet, writer, thinker, philosopher, politician, Bond died over the weekend at the age of 75, leaving an indelible impression on the nation and an unmatched lifetime of achievement in the push for equal rights for all.
Bond’s calm demeanor and soothing voice may have been rooted in his father’s profession. Although he was born in Tennessee, Bond spent much of his childhood here in the Philadelphia area, where his father, Horace Mann Bond, became the first black president of Lincoln University in Chester County. Julian Bond was schooled nearby at the George School in Bucks County. It was there at the Quaker school that the seeds of non-violent discourse and social change, coupled with community service, took seed.
They would soon sprout in Georgia, where Bond attended Morehouse College, and eventually be felt across the nation.
Bond’s voice started shaping the civil rights movement at an early age. As a college student he became involved in the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee, where he encountered an activist named Stokely Carmichael.
In 1965, Bond registered on the national political scene, making history when he was elected to the Georgia House of Representatives. But the veil of racial strife and the bitter feelings engendered by those who opposed the war in Vietnam intervened. His fellow lawmakers refused to let him take his seat. The struggle went to the U.S. Supreme Court, which ruled in Bond’s favor. He finally took his seat in the Georgia House in 1967.
It would not be his last struggle.
In 1968, Bond saw his name put into nomination for vice president at the raucous Democratic National Convention in Chicago. Bond demurred because he was too young, but not before blazing a path that would be followed decades later by another young legislator, Barack Obama.
Bond served in the Georgia House until 1975 and then six terms in the Georgia Senate until 1986. Along the way he helped carve out a U.S. Congress district to more equitably represent the black residents of the region. The seat has been held for decades by the honorable Congressman John Lewis.
But it was in 1971 that Bond laid the groundwork for a lifetime of action in the civil rights movement when he founded the Southern Poverty Law Center. He helped oversee the organization the rest of his life.
In 1998 he was elected board chairman of the NAACP, a post he held for 10 years.
Bond’s fingerprints – and in many instances his words – are all over the civil rights movement.
“He was the one who wrote the best, who framed the issues the best,” said Eleanor Holmes Norton, who teamed with Bond on that student committee in the ’60s. “He was called upon time and again to write it, to express it.”
It was those words, and Bond’s calm demeanor, that ignited the fire and passion seen in so many others in the movement.
Bond’s was not a passing passion, but rather, as described by his longtime colleague, former Atlanta Mayor and U.N. Ambassador Andrew Young, one of a “lifetime struggler.”
“I don’t know a single time when he was not involved in some phase of the civil rights movement,” Young said in reacting to Bond’s passing.
He was not alone.President Obama called him a “hero,” aptly summing up his decades of public service thusly: “Julian Bond helped change this country for the better.”
From his days involved in student sit-ins, to founding the Southern Poverty Law Center, to his leading post in the NAACP, Bond helped shape this nation’s changing views of civil rights.
For Bond, the mission was a marathon, not a sprint. His cool, calm demeanor provided the backbone of a movement.
That quiet resolve never dimmed his ardor, or his burning passion for justice.
Julian Bond was cool long before we knew what cool meant. He often used words, as opposed to simply a raised voice, to effect change.
That smooth, easygoing voice has now fallen silent.
But the words – and the changes they instilled – will live on forever.
