INTRODUCTION
WHAT JULIAN BOND TAUGHT ME
by Jeanne Theoharis
AMID PROTESTS in the summer of 2016 around the police killings of Alton Sterling and Philando Castile, Kasim Reed, then mayor of Atlanta, invoked Martin Luther King Jr.’s roots there to affirm the city’s longstanding commitment to freedom of speech. But then, explaining the large police presence at downtown protests, he scolded the young demonstrators: “Dr. King would never take a highway.”1
Earlier that year, Reverend Barbara Reynolds took to the pages of the Washington Post to criticize this new generation of protesters: “Many in my crowd admire the cause and courage of these young activists but fundamentally disagree with their approach. Trained in the tradition of Martin Luther King Jr., we were nonviolent activists who won hearts by conveying respectability and changed laws by delivering a message of love and unity. BLM [Black Lives Matter] seems intent on rejecting our proven methods.”2
Across the political spectrum, many have held up the civil rights movement to critique and chastise Black Lives Matter. These framings misrepresent the movements BLM activists are building across the country. And they greatly distort the history of the civil rights movement—as I first learned it from Professor Bond and as he lays out in this book.
Of course, King took many a highway, most famously in the Selma-to-Montgomery march, upset business as usual, and, perhaps most significantly, believed in the necessity of disruption to highlight and transform unjust policies and realities. The movement wasn’t unified, and there was much disagreement and debate about the right tactics and approaches. It was deeply disruptive and made people uncomfortable then, like it does today. And even in the moments when activists purposefully donned “respectable” attire and rooted their protest in God and country, they were regularly treated as “un-American” and unreasonable.
Calling out these myths, as Professor Bond would insist, is more than setting the historical record straight. The troubling ways the civil rights movement is being invoked in the age of Black Lives Matter are dangerous because they grossly distort how the civil rights movement actually proceeded. And they are comfortable because they allow many Americans to keep today’s movements at arm’s length. Professor Bond highlighted the dangerous and seductive power of the “master narrative” and the urgency of seeing a fuller history of the civil rights movement for understanding our past and where we must go from here.
I had the great good fortune to take a class with Julian Bond when I was an undergraduate at Harvard University and then two years later to serve as one of his teaching assistants. Julian Bond was a lifelong freedom fighter and a titan of social justice leadership. But alongside that persevering voice for justice, one of his greatest gifts was that of a teacher and movement intellectual.
To teach about the Southern civil rights movement was a way to carry it forward to a new generation, and he thrilled to this. It was a way to disrupt the stultifying, politically convenient myths—the master narrative—that had grown around the movement. That narrative, he quipped, reduced the movement to “Rosa sat down, Martin stood up, then the white folks saw the light and saved the day.”3 Or, in a less sassy fashion, he critiqued its problematic assumptions:
Traditionally, relationships between the races in the South were oppressive. In 1954, the Supreme Court decided this was wrong. Inspired by the court, courageous Americans, Black and white, took protest to the street, in the form of sit-ins, bus boycotts, and freedom rides. The protest movement, led by the brilliant and eloquent Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., aided by a sympathetic federal government, most notably the Kennedy brothers and a born-again Lyndon Johnson, was able to make America understand racial discrimination as a moral issue. Once Americans understood that discrimination was wrong, they quickly moved to remove racial prejudice and discrimination from American life, as evidenced by the Civil Rights Acts of 1964 and 1965. Inexplicably, just as the civil rights victories were piling up, many African Americans, under the banner of Black Power, turned their backs on American society.4
IN THIS MASTER NARRATIVE, as Professor Bond made clear, injustice is obvious, decent people took action, and the good guys triumphed—and then Black Power came along and ruined everything. Challenging this romanticized and dangerous fable, Professor Bond’s classes sought to give us a much fuller, more accurate, and much deeper sense of the movement’s origins and effects, its many players, and its many opponents. He also aimed to help us think about the uses behind this mythmaking—to see the ground-shaking challenge to American society and politics the civil rights movement had wrought, its unpopularity at the time, and the tremendous amount of work still to be done. To see the movement in its full complexity, to understand what it took—the strategy and the organizing, the many, many people who pushed it forward, and the many, many people who stood in its way—was necessary to understanding our own way forward.
The point, then, was not to tell us young people what to do—that the activists of old had the right way that needed to be drummed into us. Rather, he sought to challenge the fables that had grown up around the movement and the popular memory of it to ensure that we grasped the difficulty and necessity—the complications, joys, and work—of building movements and the power of youth leadership.
This book aims to make Professor Bond’s teachings available to a wider audience—to present in narrative form his history of the Southern civil rights movement. Part of what has made this possible was that he was a meticulous teacher. He wrote his class lectures out in full sentences. Over the years, he rewrote them, improved them, added new material when he learned things or read new books, and polished them again. He was always reading, and the lectures reflect that, not just his own knowledge but all that he gleaned from the growing scholarship on the modern Black freedom struggle. Most of the lectures were revised for fifteen to twenty years—and most of the ones we use here were last revised in 2006, 2007, or 2008.
The heart of the book are the lectures focused on events of the Southern civil rights movement, on events he witnessed and shaped, knew players in, understood the background for, and had a broader context to bring to bear. Pam Horowitz and I, with the help of our research assistant, Erik Wallenberg, have compiled the lectures, edited them slightly, and sewed them into a narrative history. To make this book readable and affordable, and not overly long, we could not include all of them. We have pared down his early lectures focused before World War II; trimmed the more detailed political history, including lectures that described presidential and congressional machinations; and abridged the last lectures, in which he quickly skimmed many of the events of the late 1960s. We have edited them a bit for readability and clarity. Julian would teach with Power-Point—often including long quotes from various movement actors, scores of photos, leaflets, presidential Oval Office recordings, FBI records, and material from congressional leaders. We have shortened the quotes considerably and are not including flyers, statements, or other movement ephemera that he used in his PowerPoints. But we have attempted to maintain the ways he delved into the motivations of political elites alongside those of civil rights activists—firmly believing you needed to understand how the rulers thought and moved, backstabbed and schemed, alongside the movement. He had a whole lecture devoted to music, but without the music, we could not replicate it here. We could not find a full lecture on the Vietnam War or one on SNCC and women and the Waveland conference (though I remember it from when I TA-ed the class).
We have tried to include citations wherever possible—and Erik has done yeoman’s work in tracking many down. In some places, Professor Bond had included citations or partial citations; in other places, we had to try to track them down. His lectures reflected decades of reading, and we were able to acknowledge only some of what he read. There is a lot we couldn’t necessarily piece together. He read widely and built these lectures over many years, adding to them all the time, according to Pam. Quite simply, he loved the burgeoning literature on the movement, read it assiduously, and, unlike some movement contemporaries who worried about outsiders writing their history, continuously revised his own interpretations from new evidence and analyses scholars produced. We have also included an annotated bibliography Julian used for the civil rights tours he gave from 2007 to 2015 through the University of Virginia, and we have provided short lists of suggested readings for each chapter. We have tried to credit sources Julian used or relied on for his syllabi, but, in the spirit of his commitment to keep up with the latest historiography on the movement, we have also included some more recent works in the suggested readings.
Knitting together his lectures provides a narrative history of the Southern civil rights movement—a master class—as Julian Bond taught it to me and hundreds of other undergraduates over two decades, so that a new generation of students, along with other interested readers, can continue to learn from him. The point of his lectures was not just to tell stories—though, of course, people could listen to those stories for days—but also to impart broader insights about how the direction of the nation changes, about the nature of injustice and the forces that protect it, and about our role in challenging it.
WHAT HE TAUGHT ME IN SEVEN LESSONS
Lesson 1: Movements are made; they don’t just happen. It wasn’t “Rosa Parks sat down and then people boycotted the buses.” Julian Bond started back in the 1930s and 1940s. He showed not just what happened but also how it happened. His treatment of the Montgomery bus boycott—what led to it, what it took, how it worked—spanned three classes. There I sat, my twenty-year-old self, so excited to be taking a class with the Julian Bond but wondering why he was taking so long to get through this first campaign. Character by character, he detailed the various people who came together to turn Rosa Parks’s bus stand into the Montgomery bus boycott and how they sustained that effort for 382 days. That indelibly changed how I understood—and ultimately how I would teach and write about—the civil rights movement.
In the popular narrative, the movement just happens. Rosa Parks refuses to give up her seat, people rise up and boycott, and ultimately bus segregation is defeated. It is the perfection of the American dream. What Julian Bond showed so vividly was that people made decision after hard decision after hard decision. There was nothing predestined about it. The connections they had built over years and the experiences they had informed what they did. America wasn’t naturally moving toward justice, nor did a movement just happen once someone made a courageous stand. People chose, amid searing conditions, amid threats to their person and to their livelihood, to make it happen.
So, starting decades before, he traced all the people who would come together: from E. D. Nixon to Jo Ann Robinson to Claudette Colvin to Parks herself, from the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters to the bus boycott in Baton Rouge. And then, painstakingly, once Parks made her courageous stand, he took us hour by hour, day by day, to show us who talked to whom, what decisions were made, how a movement flowered from Parks’s courageous refusal. Rosa Parks called Fred Gray, who called Jo Ann Robinson; E. D. Nixon called the ministers and reporter Jo Azbell; Jo Ann Robinson snuck into her office at Alabama State College and ran off fifty thousand leaflets; and on and on. By showing how the civil rights movement happened, it also became possible to imagine how we could do it again.
Lesson 2: The changes the civil rights movement accomplished were not the province of presidents or charismatic speakers but accomplished by the efforts and freedom visions (and sacrifices) of everyday local people possessing great courage and vision. And many, many of those people were young people. He insisted that those local people have to be known, their particular contributions detailed and lifted up—and so he did: Annie Devine, E. W. Steptoe, Johnnie Carr, Fred Gray, Unita Blackwell, Reverend T. J. Jemison, Fannie Lou Hamer, and many, many others.
He showed us the key leadership roles that young people played— Barbara Johns, Claudette Colvin and Mary Louise Smith, the Little Rock Nine (who had inspired him)—and his many friends and comrades in SNCC—Dave Dennis, Ruby Doris Smith, Charles McDew, Bob Moses, Diane Nash, Bernard and Colia Lafayette, and many, many more. They held up a mirror to the nation’s professions and its practices, forcing it to confront its original sin of systemic racism. Young people lead, he would teach, and the nation will ultimately be forced to follow. He also highlighted the elders who supported and nourished their work and how cherished that support was.
He made clear that this kind of youth leadership scared many people then, just as it scares many people now. Many white and Black people did not like or support what SNCC did. (March on Washington organizers made SNCC chair John Lewis edit his speech because they thought it too angry and confrontational, Professor Bond schooled us.) So he cautioned that we shouldn’t be surprised when adults, even adults sympathetic to our cause, would be some of the first to criticize us or say we weren’t going about it the right way, because that was what had happened throughout the civil rights movement.
Lesson 3: Social change and social oppression are about choice. There was nothing destined about the civil rights movement. Fate didn’t determine Dr. King’s leadership. He had to choose to step forward, again and again.
Professor Bond spent a lot of time detailing the sit-ins and Freedom Rides—how people imagined what was possible beyond what others thought feasible or reasonable. How they stepped forward, how they insisted on not stopping, and that by acting they went beyond what they thought they could do—thereby changing the freedom they could imagine.
He told a funny story of his own initiation into the struggle.
“What do you think about the Greensboro sit-in?” fellow More-house student Lonnie King asked twenty-year-old Bond.
“I think it’s great!”
“Don’t you think it ought to happen here?” he asked.
“Oh, I’m sure it will happen here,” I responded. “Surely someone here will do it.”
Then [came] to me, as it came to others in those early days in 1960, a query, an invitation, a command: “Why don’t we make it happen here?”5
In his graceful way, he showed how he—like us—admired courageous action but had imagined someone else would take it forward. And then he realized that it needed to be him; that assuming someone else would summon the courage was part of how oppressive systems were maintained. One of the things he stressed about the sit-ins was that they arose from a younger generation frustrated with people decrying injustice but not acting. And so they decided to take action themselves.
Four college freshmen in Greensboro. Four friends. If you had three friends, you could start, his lectures made clear. The Freedom Rides too, when they encountered massive violence in Anniston and CORE pulled back, the young people of SNCC stepped forward. They were determined that the message could not be that violence could stop the movement—and by pushing forward, they forced the nation to see and the Kennedys to act.
Professor Bond also stressed the choice of inaction, the choice of silence, the choice of preferring order to justice. Birmingham police commissioner Bull Connor, Alabama governor George Wallace, and Medgar Evers’s killer, Byron de la Beckwith, were not the only villains in his lectures. So, too, were the people who sat on the sidelines and allowed white resistance against Black equality—be it physical violence, economic assassination, or social ostracism—to grow and spread. He reminded us how uncomfortable people were with the movement’s disruptive tactics fifty years ago—colleges suspended SNCC students, newspapers editorialized against them, moderate leaders decried civil disobedience and disruptiveness, and allies traded their rights away. So, to just focus on the likes of Bull Connor missed what made the movement so very hard and why many of its goals remain unattained today.
Professor Bond made sure we understood that when Dr. King went to jail in Birmingham, one of the most violently racist cities in the country, King nonetheless zeroed in on the problem of the white moderate. “I have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the Negro’s great stumbling block in the stride toward freedom is not the White Citizens’ Council-er or the Ku Klux Klanner, but the white moderate who is more devoted to ‘order’ than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says ‘I agree with you in the goal you seek, but I can’t agree with your methods of direct action.’“ Opposition to the civil rights movement went far beyond water hoses and burning crosses to those who claimed allegiance to the goals but constantly decried their tactics or their bluntness.
Lesson 4: Movements take years and decades, and they are unpopular. The civil rights movement began long before it was publicly recognized, long before the Brown v. Board of Education decision and the Montgomery bus boycott. And it continued long after the Voting Rights Act was signed and the TV cameras packed up and went home.
Professor Bond made sure we understood that many of these civil rights heroes and heroines spent years and decades in the wilderness, taking stand after stand but not knowing if they would see change in their lifetime. Most Americans kept the struggle at a distance. The task of social justice requires years and decades of perseverance. The idea that once King or SNCC had revealed injustice to the country most Americans got on board to change it was a convenient falsehood. It required doing it again and again, creating a sense of persistent uncomfortableness to make it impossible for people to continue to dismiss the issues.
The majority of Americans in the 1960s did not support the civil rights movement. In May 1961, in a Gallup survey, only 22 percent of Americans approved of what the Freedom Riders were doing, and 57 percent said that “the sit-ins at lunch counters, freedom buses and other demonstrations by Negroes were hurting the Negro’s chances of being integrated in the South.”6 In 1966, a year after the Selma-to-Montgomery March and the passage of the Voting Rights Act, 85 percent of white people and 30 percent of Black people nationally believed that civil rights demonstrations by Black people hurt the advancement of civil rights.7 Seventy-two percent of Americans had an unfavorable view of King.8 Lest we see this as Southerners skewing the national sample, in 1964, a year before the passage of the Voting Rights Act, in a poll conducted by the New York Times, a majority of white New Yorkers said the civil rights movement had gone too far and spoke of Black people receiving “everything on a silver platter” and of “reverse discrimination” against whites.9
No amount of respectability protects one from the relentlessness and fury of the opposition, Professor Bond made clear. Yet he was a “hopeless optimist,” as he put it, saying, “I always believe things will work out.” Not because things just naturally work out. Not because injustice once revealed is automatically fixed. Not because if one acts right and tries hard and wears a nice dress or a suit, then things have a way of working out. But because of what he knew from firsthand experience: the power of ordinary people to change this country through their will, tenacity, and perseverance.
And so Professor Bond made clear that the popular embrace of the civil rights movement happened years and decades after the movement’s peak. Your righteousness will not be validated in the moment, he taught us. Rather, it requires faith and steadfastness, building community, and embracing sheer orneriness—because you will repeatedly be made to feel crazy, off-base, even seditious. But we must not fall prey to nihilism, because what he knew, what he had seen, is that things do change from the most unlikely places, from “the stone that the builders rejected.”
Lesson 5: There was nothing inexplicable about Black Power. The civil rights and Black Power movements, as his lectures showed, were often inextricably linked. From Rosa Parks to Robert Williams to Gloria Richardson, many key activists believed in the right of self-defense and the power of nonviolent direct action; they held a variety of goals, from economic justice and opposition to US foreign policy to independent Black political power and desegregation. Professor Bond insisted that the story of Black Power needed to start much earlier, and he took issue with the ways that Black militancy was often framed as coming out of nowhere when there was a long history of often-frustrated struggle and Black grievances that preceded it. So you couldn’t look at SNCC’s turn toward Black Power in Lowndes County, Alabama, he made clear, without seeing the sellout of the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party by Democratic Party leaders and other liberal allies. The uprisings of the mid-1960s were preceded by movements against school and housing segregation and police brutality that had made few gains. The Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts were not the ends but crucial, hard-won steps on a much longer road for full social justice. The movement’s growing demands and its growing militancy were an outgrowth of the immense opposition, deep silence, and shallow commitments from supposed allies and the American public that they faced time and again.
And the movement carried on long after the cameras went home. The Black freedom struggle was part of a larger global human rights struggle. And so SNCC activists made global connections—from ardent opposition to the Vietnam War and South African apartheid to the connections with anticolonial struggles and Palestinian self-determination. They were lambasted for being outside the bounds of civil rights, just as the Movement for Black Lives making common cause with Palestinian struggles has been today. When MLK took the pulpit of Riverside Church in 1967, the New York Times blasted him; the Washington Post blasted him; the NAACP blasted him.10 Dr. King was supposed to stay in his lane. So, too, Julian Bond, who was elected to the Georgia legislature but whose colleagues refused to seat him because of his opposition to the war. He fought all the way to the Supreme Court and finally was seated because civil rights were part of a larger global struggle for human rights.
Professor Bond decried the sentimentalization of the movement. A persistent supporter of gay rights, he refused to attend Coretta Scott King’s funeral because it was held not at the King family church, Ebenezer Baptist Church, but at New Birth Missionary Baptist Church, run by the homophobic Reverend Eddie Long. This was a disservice to her and her lifetime of human rights work—and he was not going to participate in it.
He rejoiced and supported new movements of Dreamers, Dream Defenders, and Black Lives Matter activists. He loved the energy, vision, and tenacity of youth organizing around police violence, mass incarceration, and immigration policy, saying they reminded him of himself when he was young. He did not engage, like some of his movement comrades, in the “you’re not doing it the right way, and why are you so angry” criticism of youth militancy. Professor Bond understood why they were angry because he was too.
Lesson 6: Learning is essential for movements and for teachers. Twelve-hour-meetings, mistakes, disagreements: the civil rights movement was made by people who were figuring and thinking and acting and learning and rethinking and adjusting. Professor Bond wasn’t afraid to talk about that process, about the learning that happened in the movement. They were young people. There were serious generational and ideological divides, and they didn’t always agree or get it right the first time. By learning and changing, by pressing forward, and by course-correcting, the movement carried on. Study groups, study groups, study groups, he stressed.
Key to that was not to be ashamed when you don’t know the whole story. When I started working on my biography of Rosa Parks, I interviewed him.11 I aimed to detail her post-Montgomery activism in Detroit, not just her time in Montgomery, but he didn’t have much to add, ruefully admitting, “I met her numerous times over her lifetime. . . . I just talked to her about innocuous things and never delved deeper. . . . I thought I knew everything to know about her.”12 And so he opened countless doors for me to try to help me get the bigger story. And then when I published the book, he made sure people heard about it, even the hard parts. In fact, it was during a conversation we were having about Rosa Parks’s suffering—and how this little radical NAACP chapter in River Rouge, Michigan, run by Black Communists shamed the national NAACP into helping Parks with the medical bills she couldn’t afford—that he decided that the whole executive board of the NAACP needed to hear this story. History is not what people like to hear, Bond believed; it’s what people need to learn to better understand our past and our future.
Lesson 7: Mentorship is powerful and transformative. What an incredible gift it is to have a teacher who believes in the power of movements, a mentor who sees the potential of young people to change the course of history, and a visionary who reveals the capacity of our darkest demons to change over time.
SNCC embodied the leadership and organizing abilities of every person. People like Ella Baker and organizations like Highlander Folk School put that philosophy into practice through leadership building. One of my favorite stories Professor Bond told was about Ella Baker, one of SNCC’s most invaluable mentors. SNCC meetings would last for hours and hours, and people would smoke. Ella Baker would sit there hour after hour with them, wearing a face mask (because the smoke bothered her), taking part, listening, occasionally offering a comment until people got where they needed to go.
Like Ella Baker with her face mask, Julian Bond was not a fair-weather mentor. He didn’t just write a blurb or make an introduction—any of which would have been an incredible honor. He was a movement mentor, understanding what it takes to help someone find her voice. And part of the work of mentoring that Baker and Bond both embodied is to place themselves in the background, not to dispense advice from on high or insist on how things “should be done.”
Julian Bond mentored in matter-of-fact, often understated ways. At a moment when people were always remarking how busy they were, how full their plate was, Professor Bond was different. He wrote letters, opened doors, and sent notes like it was no big deal, like he wasn’t too busy and didn’t have to remind you of all the work he was doing, of how much he knew, or how he had been there long before you.
He thrilled to the surge of youth movements, seeing himself in them and encouraging them forward. In the end, mentoring is not about being The Mentor; it’s about enabling young people to fly beyond what has come before.
That was the power of the civil rights movement, as Julian Bond taught it—a launching pad for us, so we could imagine going further and demanding more of the nation. Rest in power, Julian Bond. Your lessons continue.