Celebrating the Legacy of Horace Julian Bond, 1940-2015

ELEBRATING THE LEGA Y OF
HORACE JULIAN BOND
1940-2015
Sunday, October 25, 2015, 5:30 PM Martin Luther King Jr. International Chapel
Morehouse College

INTRODUCTION
Events in 1960 shaped the man Horace "J~lian" Bond would become and set the
trajectory for his career as a respected statesman, committed educator and lifelong social and civil rights activist. In February of that year, news of four students from North Carolina Agricultural & Technical College who sat down at a racially segregated Woolworth's lunch counter in Greensboro, North Carolina, torpedoed across the nation and ignited a nonviolent student movement.
Bond was a junior studying English at Morehouse College in Atlanta . Morehouse was a rare oasis for black men in the South-a place where they were academically chal lenged, openly celebrated and, most importantly, insulated from a society that denied their worth in demoralizing and often violent ways.
Intellectual giants and wise counsel such as Morehouse President Benjamin E. Mays-who often told his students that "not failure, but low aim is sin"-walked the campus ' historic grounds where, iron1cally, Confederate soldiers had fought and died a century earlier to keep blacks under the thumb of white oppression .
At Morehouse, Bond took a class in philosophy taught by Martin Luther King Jr., a young Morehouse graduate, intellectual and preacher who had emerged as a leader of the civil rights movement. Indeed, Morehouse was fertile soil from which Bond's ideals and passion for all that he would later achieve could germinate. Yet, just a year before he was to graduate, Bond could not ignore the urge to put theories and principles to work in the real world . His eye, he said, was on the ultimate prize of freedom. For that, even his Morehouse degree could wait. Though he faced imprisonment and violence, Bond was emphatic: "The prize [to eliminate segregation] was worth the risk, " he would tell his parents.
In March, Bond and other Atlanta University Center students penned "The Appeal for Human Rights," a manifesto for racial equality published in city papers. It became the catalyst for the formation of the Atlanta Student Movement. Brave words were soon followed by courageous action when, six days later, students took to the streets of segregated Atlanta with sit-ins and boycotts.
In April 1960, Bond helped form the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) at Morehouse.
And so, at the tender age of 20, Bond made history-because the work of SNCC and the Atlanta Student
Movement eventually contributed to the passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 that granted voting rights to
blacks and helped eradicate inequities in education, jobs, housing, hospitals and law enforcement.
Over the next five decades, Bond's passion for justice never wavered. He lived a life of deep impact and consequence, where individual lives and the collective life of a country were changed for the good.
"We admired Julian for his embrace of life as a joumey...an enduring responsibility to keep the arc of history bending towards justice .. "
-Former U.S. President William "Bill" Clinton and Hillary Rodham Clinton

EDUCATION

Julian Bond's father was the first African American president of Lincoln University. His mother was a librarian and teacher. So Bond's decision to give up education at Morehouse College to work as a full-time foot soldier in the civil rights movement was one he needed to break gently to his parents.

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"The idea that I wou ld risk my education by getting arrested or by dropping out of college was just awful to them," Bond recalled. " But at the same time, they were very supportive of the civil rights movement and encouraged me to get engaged in it, and so torn between these two things and ... my promise that I would go back to school some day and finish my degree-which I did do-they acquiesced."
Bond returned to Morehouse and earned his bachelor's degree in English in 1971 . After a long deployment in the trenches of the movement, he returned to education in 1992, this time as a professor. But the change of venue didn't mean he had vacated the cause-he simply took the battle to the classroom .

Waging the fight for equal rights in the classroom was not completely new to Bond . He wrote in the Indiana Law Journal, "I not only have spent most of my adult life in the cause of integration, but in 1947-when I was seven years old-1 was a plaintiff in a lawsuit against segregated schools in rural Pennsylvania ."

When it came to knowledge of civil rights in America, he found the 21st century classroom to be a barren site . In his forward from the 2011 Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) report titled "Teaching the Movement: The State Standards We Deserve," Bond wrote: "None [of the students] could tell me who George Wallace, the segregationist governor of Alabama, was. One student thought he was a CBS newsman who had covered the Vietnam War. They knew sanitized vers ions of the lives and struggles of Martin Luther King Jr. and Rosa Parks, but nothing of their real stories ."

Bond taught at some of the nation's most prestigious colleges and universities including Harvard, Drexel and the University of Pennsylvania. He was a distinguished scholar-in-residence at American University in Washington D.C. and a professor of history at the University of Virginia where he was co-director of the oral history project, Explorations in Black Leadership. As the host of the program, Bond interviewed a wide spectrum of black leaders from Clarence Thomas, the second African American justice on the U.S. Supreme Court, to civil rights activists Angela Davis and Dorothy Height.

Bond also held the Civil Rights South Seminars for nine years that were sponsored by the University of Virginia, where he took busloads of faculty and students to visit the landmark sites of the civil rights struggle. He published a book of essays titled A II Time to Speak, a Time to Act" in 1972, and wrote articles for The Nation, Negro Digest and other periodicals. He also was the narrator of "Eyes on the Prize," an award winning, 14-hour documentary that is still used extensively in schools and teach ing environments to document the most important American social justice movement of the 20th century.

II An educated populace must be taught the basics about American history," Bond once said. "One of these basics is the civil rights movement, a nonviolent revolution as important as the first American Revo lution . It is a history that continues to shape the America we all live in today."

SOCIAL JUSTICE
Julian Bond's commitment to social justice is one of his greatest legacies." He managed to spend his entire life in civil rights. Not the sentimental civil rights of our SNCC days, but the civil rights of our time," said Congresswoman Eleanor Holmes Norton (D-D.C.) "Julian was not only a survivor of SNCC, he went on to grow the civil rights movement ... I am going to miss having a national spokesman who, when something happens on the right, can speak out for our country. There's really very few people like that who's nationally known, who's nationally prominent, and who's nationally appreciated across the generations."
Bond served as president of The Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) from 1971 to 1979, then as a board member for the rest of his life. "He knew it was going to take a lot of blood, sweat and tears," said SPLC founder Morris Dees. "So, he told us that as long as we agreed to keep our eyes on the prize and never give up, he'd agree to become our first president and stand with us for as long as it took. And that's exactly what he did- from those early days to just a few months ago."
During the early years, the law center focused heavily on demolishing remnants of Jim Crow and challenged numerous discriminatory policies such as the forced sterilization of thousands of black teenage girls and the placement of homeless black children in detention facilities. Bond was an integral part of the SPLC's success, serving as the narrator for the SPLCs Oscar-winning documentary, "A Time for Justice," as well as the Academy Award-nominated "Shadow of Hate." He recently served as a consultant on the SPLC's latest film about voting rights in Selma .
Bond served as president of the Atlanta chapter of the NAACP for six years, and later, as the organization's national chair from 1998 to 2012 . With the gravitas of a man who had given a half century of service to enlightening a nation and uplifting his people, Bond appeared before a crowd gathered for the 50th anniversary of the 1963 March on Washington in 2013 and renewed his commitment: "We're still being tested by hardship and adversity, from the elevations of Stand Your Ground laws to the evisceration of the Voting Rights Act. But today, we recommit ourselves as we did 50 years ago to greater efforts and grander victories."
Recently, he fought to overturn the Defense of Marriage Act that excluded lesbian, gay, b isexual and transgendered (LGBT) people from marrying, speaking in a voice that was eloquent and unequivocaleven in the face of controversy." Black people don 't have a patent on fighting for civil rights," Bond said . "We ought to be happy that other people, including gays and lesbians and many other people, have imitated the black movement for human rights .... We ought to be proud that we serve as examples to others."
Bond's ideal of a just world included space for all people. This, he said, would diminish the need for services designed to address injustices. "If you create a world where there is social justice, there will never be a need for social service. So I've chosen to work for social justice. But I think social service is a wonderful pursuit in life.. .. The important thing is that you have to do something because doing nothing really means you've joined the other side."

C L BRATING H L GA Y O HORA E jULIAN BOND '7 1

PRELUDE CALL TO REMEMBRANCE OPENING SONG

PRE IDIN G Dr. Lawrence Edward Carter Sr., Dean Martin Luther King Jr. International Chapel
"Come Thou Fount of Every Blessing"
"Lift Every Voice and Sing" James Weldon Johnson, J. Rosamond ~ohnson
Dr. Curtis Everett Powell, Conducting

arr. David Frances Oliver
Dean Carter
Atlanta University Center (AUC) Combined Chorus arr. Roland Carter

Morehouse and Spelman College Glee Clubs and Clark Atlanta University Philharmonic Society
Dr. David Morrow '80, Dr. Kevin Johnson and Dr. Curtis Everett Powell Directors

GREETINGS SPIRITUAL TRIBUTES

Dr. John Silvanus Wilson Jr. '79 President, Morehouse College
The Honorable M. Kasim Reed Mayor, City of Atlanta

// Steal Away//
Dr. Kevin Johnson, Conducting

AUC Combined Chorus arr. Kevin Johnson

OLLEGIA Y AR
The Honorable Carolyn Long Banks Atlanta City Councilwoman (1980-1997)
Ms. Charlayne Hunter-Gault Award -Winning International Journalist The Honorable Frank Smith, Ph.D. '65 Former Washington D.C. City Councilman Director, African American Civil War Memorial and Museum
Ms. Constance Curry Attorney/Author
Dr. Robert P. Moses Founder/President, The Algebra Project

MUSICAL TRIBUTE

// The Movement in Song" arr. T. Renee Crutcher

The Reverend T. Renee Crutcher Spiritual Director, Sankofa Ministries