INTRODUCTION TO THE COURSE

by Julian Bond

WELCOME. I INTEND to share with you a rapidly expanding historiography of the movement for civil rights. There are new books appearing almost weekly. Speaking in the largest generalities, the course of civil rights scholarship over the last decades has changed radically from an emphasis on “great men”—Martin Luther King, Presidents Kennedy or Johnson—and a top-down narrative to state and community studies where the efforts of individuals and local groups are prominent. Rather than looking at the movement through a telescope, scholars are beginning to look at it through a microscope, and what I teach is informed by these new views as well as older interpretations of what the movement was and who made it.

I also teach from my own experiences. I spent most of my early years in the South, in rural Georgia and urban Atlanta. I grew up on university campuses—at Fort Valley State College outside Macon, Georgia, and on the campus of Lincoln University in Pennsylvania. My father was an academic and my mother a schoolteacher and then librarian.

I am fortunate to have been born in 1940—too soon to be a baby boomer but old enough to have been eyewitness to and participant in much of the history we are going to study. I was in Atlanta in February 1960 when the sit-ins began there, and I helped to organize them and was arrested there at Atlanta’s City Hall for the first time.

I was one of several hundred students from across the South who gathered in Raleigh, North Carolina, on Easter 1960 to found the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), and I became the organization’s communications director, a position I held for five years.

I helped to organize Atlanta’s sit-in movement, which successfully integrated the city’s lunch counters, parks, and tennis courts and movie theaters over the next several years.

On May 13, 1961, I met with the Freedom Riders as they passed through Atlanta, never dreaming that they would be viciously attacked and beaten—some of them near death—in Anniston and Birmingham the next day.

I was in Albany, Georgia, in 1961 when a movement, built by the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and then joined and led by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., fought and floundered.

I was in rural Southwest Mississippi in 1961 when SNCC established its first beachhead in the most resistant state, and I met a man who was later murdered because he dared to try to register to vote.

I was in Birmingham late on the afternoon of the bombing that morning of the Sixteenth Street Baptist Church that killed four schoolgirls.

I was at the 1963 March on Washington when Dr. King delivered his “I Have a Dream” speech.

I was in Selma when that movement began in 1963 and in Montgomery in 1965 when the Selma-to-Montgomery marchers arrived.

And in 1965, as the civil rights movement began to shift from confrontational protest tactics back to electoral strategies, I was elected to the Georgia House of Representatives. I was expelled from the legislature because of my opposition to the war in Vietnam and my seat declared vacant; I ran for the vacancy, won the election, and was expelled again. One of my constituents, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., led a march on the Georgia State Capitol protesting my exclusion. I ran a third time, and, in the interval, the US Supreme Court decided that the Georgia House was wrong to deny me my seat, and I served—in the Georgia House and Senate—for the next twenty years.

In the course of these years I met many of the movement’s participants—leaders and less-well-known personalities—Martin Luther King and Malcolm X and Ella Baker and Fannie Lou Hamer and James Farmer and James Forman and many, many others.

Where I can, I am going to draw on my own experiences, as a young Black Southerner, college student, and movement activist, as the move ment unfolded around me. In my life, there has never been anything like it. I was surrounded by other people my age—we were running this thing. We raised the money. We did the work. These people are my closest friends today. You come so close to the people with whom you work that you are bound to them for the rest of your life.