Julian Bond - Race Man: Selected Works, 1960-2015

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

My debt to Pamela Horowitz is deep. Her decision to allow me to publish Julian Bonds works was remarkably generous, and I remain grateful for the opportunity to help advance the rich legacy of her former husband.

This is my fourth book published by City Lights, and my admiration for publisher and editor Elaine Katzenberger continues to deepen, especially because of the vision and passion she brings to the table. Thanks to Elaine and her excellent team, especially Stacey Lewis, Emma Hager, Chris Carosi, and Linda Ronan.

I am also grateful to the following individuals and institutions: my friend Sharon Herr, who proofread the manuscript; my inspiring studentsNadia Mourtaj, Mary Beth Flumerfelt, and Luke Mackeywho assisted with copying, typing, and proofreading; the knowledgeable staff at the Albert and Shirley Small Collections Library at the University of Virginia; Ashley Levett of the Southern Poverty Law Center; University of Virginia PhD student Brian Neumann and Emory University PhD student Louis Fagnan, who offered invaluable research assistance; Alex Hagen-Frederiksen, who provided helpful comments on the manuscript; Elizabeth Gritter and Phyllis Leffler, whose interviews of Bond are substantive and sharp; historians Jeanne Theoharis and Douglas Brinkley, whose words about their friend frame the contents of this book so well; Kristi Kneas and the High Library staff at Elizabethtown College; and, as always, the cool kids who give me reason to keep on keeping onRobert Long Jr., Karin Frederiksen Long, Jackson Griffith Long, and Nathaniel Finn Long.

AFTERWORD

Douglas Brinkley

Nobody cared more about equal rights than my friend Julian Bond. Blessed with a fierce intellect, an open-minded worldview, cool wit, poetic grace, and general all-around elegance of spirit, Bond spent a lifetime struggling to crush the iron shackles of bigotry in all its nefarious guises. Fearlessness was his artillery in speaking truth to power and teaching tolerance for all. History will assuredly remember the public highwater marks of his noble political life, including his 1960s civil rights activism with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee at Morehouse College in Atlanta, and his twenty bravura years in the Georgia General Assembly. But it was his ceaseless, decade-by-decade campaign to realize social justice in America that made him an indispensable public intellectual for the ages. Whether on TV or in a lecture hall, Julians charisma electrified whatever issue he took on. Whether you were a poor single mother from the Kentucky coalfields, a gay man seeking the right to marry in Indiana, or a day laborer sick from inhaling pesticides in a San Joaquin Valley lettuce field, Bond brought you into his orbit with compassion and an unswerving defense of your inherent civil and human rights. While Bond didnt have the oratorical skills of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., the political patience of Barack Obama, or the organizational chops of Morris Dees, he was their peer in insisting that the arc of justice bent in the progressive direction of inclusion.

This essential omnibus contains a treasure trove of Julians first-rate thinking. On every page is proof of his determination to protect hard-won civil liberties, equal rights, and New DealGreat Society progressivism, through the rough and tumble of an ever-shifting political landscape. With fearlessness and unerring consistency, Bond took on powerful presidents like Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush for their complicity in perpetuating hateful white supremacist policies and ideology. Bonds essay in this volume attacking Reagans support of constructive engagement in South Africa is a fine case in point. To Bond, South African apartheid was an evil that constituted a direct personal threat to us all. That he was boldly willing to connect Reagans 1980s refusal to denounce apartheid with Adolf Hitlers 1930s and 40s anti-Semitism, exemplifies Bonds take-no-prisoners, David-versus-Goliath approach to defeating prejudice. Equivocation had no part in his conception. On issues of race, he was a blowtorch, unstinting and direct in both his speeches and his writings. This made him controversial, but his bluntness about bigotry in all of its insidious guises was the megaphone he used to elevate his global freedom-seeking philosophy.

Bonds critics often considered him a bomb-throwing radical, but I didnt see him that way. While he was blunt about his antiracism, he was also a mensch who loved people and joked incessantly. Far from being angry or brutal, he was a teacher at heart, patient as Job when educating young folks. Whether teaching a class on freedom at the University of Virginia or taking Louisiana students down the Civil Rights Trail on my Majic Bus traveling-education program, Bond was always the gentle scholar-activist, willing to help the next generation with his time, love, and experience. His discourse about the enduring lessons of W. E. B. Du Bois, James Baldwin, and Fanny Lou Hamer were unforgettable. He was a master of the sweep of U.S. history, from Jamestown to Selma and beyond. As is so clearly evident in the writings he left behind, Bond fervently believed in the Declaration of Independences boast that All men are created equal, and he saw the civil rights acts of the 1960s as foundational documents of the American story, as surely as the Bill of Rights or the Emancipation Proclamation. These were ideals that had to be fought for, especially in the face of entrenched political and social forces that had rigged the game against African Americans.

It is hardly surprising that American society remains racially divided today, Bond wrote. In statistics measuring infant mortality, life expectancy, and unemployment, rates of poverty, education completed and median family income, black Americans remain disproportionately mired at the bottom. In national election returns and in surveys on attitudes toward race and the economy, black and white Americans stand on opposite sides of a deep chasm.

Bonds racial pride and his history with the civil rights movement caused many to see him primarily as a race man, preoccupied with black issues to the exclusion of all else. But in truth, he was always a fighter for the underdog and the abused, no matter the color of their skin. His lifelong stance was that of an open-hearted humanitarian disturbed by a range of societal ills. He was adamantly opposed to the death penalty. He was sickened that the United States took advantage of poorer nations in our hemisphere, like Nicaragua, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, and Costa Rica. But what constantly concerned Bond, as is self-evident in these essays, was that greed had become the national religion of the United States. A new form of social Darwinism has been foisted upon usthe survival of the richest, Bond once lamented about Ronald Reagans America, with a prescience that echoes to the present day. Other prophetic lines in this book speak directly to us in the age of Donald Trump. Bond warns of U.S. presidents who drive Americans apart when they could have pulled us together. He writes about attempts to roll back Roe v. Wade and about Washington lawmakers promoting the doctrine of hate over the doctrine of love.

Even though Bond died in 2015, his essays will live forever as proof of what a teacher-activist-politician-oracle-poet-humanist can accomplish if they are willing to hold tyrants accountable. As Barack Obama so eloquently put it, Bonds leadership and spirit are eternal.

CHAPTER ONE

The Atlanta Movement and SNCC

The Fuel of My Civil Rights Fire

In this recounting of some of his early influences, Bond does not mention the George School, a coeducational Quaker boarding school in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, from which he graduated before enrolling at Morehouse College in Atlanta in 1957. But he did state at other points that the Quaker tenets of nonviolence, speaking truth to power, egalitarianism, and collective decision-making molded him for a life in the civil rights movement. The teachings of his father, Horace Mann Bond, were no less formative, and Bond was told that he had a responsibility to use his education for the betterment of those in need.