ABOUT THE AUTHOR

FROM HIS CIVIL RIGHTS AND ANTIWAR ACTIVISM in the 1960s to his support for gay rights in the new millennium, Julian Bond was on the cutting edge of social change,

As a college student in 1960, he was a leader of the Atlanta sit-in movement and a founder of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). For the next five years, as SNCC’s communications director, he covered or participated in every major event of the Southern civil rights movement.

When Bond won election to the Georgia House, in 1965, his fellow legislators refused to seat him because of his opposition to the war in Vietnam. It took two more electoral victories and a unanimous US Supreme Court decision for him to be seated. That fight captured the country’s attention and made Bond a household name, leading to his becoming, in 1968, the first African American to be nominated to the vice presidency of the United States. At aged twenty-eight, he was too young to serve.

After twenty years in the Georgia House and Senate, he began a twenty-five-year career as a college professor, teaching first at Drexel University, then at the University of Pennsylvania, Williams College, and Harvard University, and then permanently at the University of Virginia and American University.

His lifetime of activism took him from serving as the first president of the Southern Poverty Law Center during the 1970s to the chairmanship of the NAACP, the nation’s oldest and largest civil rights organization, from 1998 to 2010. He was the first national Black leader to support the fight for marriage equality.

Bond was also a television commentator, a writer, a host of Saturday Night Live, an actor (Ray, 5 to 7), and the narrator of several prize-winning documentaries, including A Time for Justice and Eyes on the Prize.