Julian Bond

Horace Julian Bond was born on the fourteenth of January 1940 at Nashville, Tennessee, the eldest of three children of Horace Mann Bond — the first African American president of Lincoln University of Pennsylvania — and Julia Washington Agnes Bond, a librarian. The Bond household was a leading Black professional family of post-war American academic life; W. E. B. Du Bois (placed in this archive) was his godfather. He attended the integrated George School in Newtown, Pennsylvania, from 1952 to 1957 and entered Morehouse College at seventeen on a Ford Foundation Early Admissions Scholarship.

He joined the Atlanta sit-in movement of February 1960 in his sophomore year at Morehouse and was a founding member of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee at the Shaw University founding meeting of April 1960. He served as SNCC's communications director from 1961 to 1965 — supervising the production of the Student Voice newspaper and the principal national-press relations of the organisation across the 1961 Freedom Rides, the 1962 Albany Movement, and the 1963 March on Washington.

He was elected to the Georgia House of Representatives in November 1965 from the Atlanta One Hundred Thirty-Sixth Legislative District — at twenty-five, among the first African Americans elected to the Georgia General Assembly since Reconstruction. The Georgia House refused on the tenth of January 1966 to seat him on grounds of his SNCC public statements against the Vietnam War. He sued the Georgia House under the First Amendment. The Supreme Court ruled unanimously in his favour in Bond v. Floyd of December 1966. He was seated in January 1967 and served twenty years until 1986.

He co-founded with Morris Dees in 1971 the Southern Poverty Law Center at Montgomery, Alabama, and served as its first president from 1971 to 1979.

He was nominated for Vice President of the United States at the 1968 Democratic National Convention at Chicago by Wisconsin delegate Theodore F. Bilbo — at twenty-eight, the youngest person to be nominated to the national executive ticket of either major American political party. He declined the nomination as constitutionally ineligible by age.

He served as chair of the NAACP from 1998 to 2010 — the longest chairmanship in the organisation's modern history.

He died of vascular complications at Fort Walton Beach, Florida, on the fifteenth of August 2015, at seventy-five.

He is honored here as the communications director of SNCC and the longest-serving chair of the modern NAACP.