Civil Rights, NAACP Legend Julian Bond Dead at 75

NAACP Legend Julian Bond Deat at 75
Photo Courtesy: UPI

FORT WALTON BEACH, Fla., Aug. 16 (UPI) — Julian Bond, a legendary civil rights revolutionary and leader of the National Association For the Advancement of Colored People, died Saturday at the age of 75 — following a half century of relentlessly helping lead the charge toward equality for American minority groups.

The Southern Poverty Law Center, an Alabama-based public interest law firm that Bond co-founded, announced his death Sunday morning, calling him a revolutionary and civil rights champion. Bond was also the center’s first president.

“With Julian’s passing, the country has lost one of its most passionate and eloquent voices for the cause of justice,” SPLC co-founder Morris Dees said in a statement. “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.”

Bond began his activism as a student in Atlanta during the sixties, when the civil rights movement exploded in the United States. His first foray into the arena began with the founding of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee in 1960 with activist Ella Baker, which resulted from a meeting at a North Carolina university.

For the first few years of his work, Bond traveled around to southern states to help organize peaceful civil rights demonstrations, activities and voter registration drives in the same vein that the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., did at the same time.

“A final SNCC legacy is the destruction of the psychological shackles which had kept black southerners in physical and mental peonage; SNCC helped break those chains forever. It demonstrated that ordinary women and men, young and old, could perform extraordinary tasks,” Bond said of his work with the organization.

In addition to his role as co-founder, he was also the group’s communications director — the main executive responsible for the SNCC’s public relations image and reputation during a bitterly divisive and politically volatile era.

Bond served as president of the SJLC for nearly the entire decade of the seventies, and later joined its board of directors.

Though politically active, Bond struggled in his early years to determine which party to affiliate with and ultimately lined up with the Democrats — the party whose commander-in-chief, Lyndon B. Johnson, spearheaded the landmark Civil Rights Act in 1964 and the Voting Rights Act a year later.

Between 1967 and 1987, Bond served as a member of both the Georgia House of Representatives and the Georgia Senate. In 1998 he became chairman of the NAACP — a position he held until 2010.

He was also a writer, poet, television commentator, lecturer, college teacher, and persistent opponent of the stubborn remnants of white supremacy, The New York Times noted Sunday.

“The country has lost one of its most passionate and eloquent voices for the cause of justice,” Dees stated. “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.”

More recently, Bond was active in his support of same sex rights.

“Many gays and lesbians worked side-by-side with me in the sixties civil rights movement,” he said. “Am I now to tell them, ‘Thanks for risking life and limb helping me win my rights’ — but they can’t share now in the equality they helped win? Not a chance.”

Bond is survived by his wife, the former Pamela Horowitz, herself a former SPLC attorney, and his five children.

Bond died at his home in Fort Walton Beach, Fla., after a brief illness.

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