Horace Julian Bond (January 14, 1940 – August 15, 2015) was an American social activist, leader of the civil rights movement, politician, professor, and writer. While he was a student at Morehouse College in Atlanta, Georgia, during the early 1960s, he helped establish the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). In 1971, he co-founded the Southern Poverty Law Center in Montgomery, Alabama, and served as its first president for nearly a decade.
Bond was elected to serve four terms in the Georgia House of Representatives and later he was elected to serve six terms in the Georgia State Senate, serving a total of twenty years in both legislative chambers. Following his career in the legislature, he was a professor of history at the University of Virginia from 1990 to 2012. From 1998 to 2010, he was chairman of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP).
Bond was born in 1940 at Hubbard Hospital in Nashville, Tennessee, to parents Julia Agnes (Washington) and Horace Mann Bond. His father was an educator, then president of Fort Valley State College. His mother, Julia, was a former librarian at Clark Atlanta University, also a historically black college.
The family resided on campus at Fort Valley State College. The house of the Bonds was a frequent stop for scholars, activists, and celebrities passing through, such as W. E. B. Du Bois and Paul Robeson.
In 1945, Bond's father accepted the position of president of Lincoln University, where he was its first African-American president, and the family moved North.
In 1957, Bond graduated from George School, a private Quaker preparatory boarding school near Newtown in Bucks County, Pennsylvania. He attended Morehouse College, a historically black college in Atlanta, Georgia. He was very involved at Morehouse. He was a swimmer on the varsity squad. He worked as an intern at Time magazine and was one of the founding members of The Pegasus, a literary magazine.
Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee
On April 17, 1960, Bond helped co-found the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC).
In 1961, Bond left Morehouse to join the staff of the Atlanta Inquirer, a new black protest paper he had helped establish in the summer of 1960 with Jesse Hill, Herman J. Russell, and various other students in the Atlanta Student Movement including Charlayne Hunter-Gault, and Lonnie King.
Following the white violence visited in the summer of 1961 on the first voter registration efforts (under the direction of Bob Moses) in McComb, Mississippi, including the murder of activist Herbert Lee, Bond took the new full-time position of communications director for SNCC assisted by Casey Hayden, Mary King and Dottie Miller, until September 1966. During this period, he travelled frequently to Mississippi (active in the Freedom Summer registration drive in 1964) and to Georgia, Alabama, and Arkansas.
By the mid-1960s, and without embracing a black separatist agenda, Bond had concluded that the continued presence of white organizers in SNCC was undermining black self-confidence. He later reflected:"The successes Freedom Summer achieved resulted from its embrace of a paradox — it tried to fight bigotry by appealing to people more concerned about whites, not blacks. Appealing to the nation's racism accepted white supremacy. By acknowledging its dependence on whites to popularize the civil rights struggle in the South, SNCC contradicted its rhetorical belief in the equal worth of all races, and undermined its insistence that indigenous blacks were best prepared to lead the struggle for their deliverance from white dominance."At age 31, with SNCC shedding staff and volunteers after its abortive merger with Black Panther Party, Bond returned to Morehouse College in 1971, to complete his Bachelor of Arts in English.
In addition to his organizing with SNCC, Bond ran for political office in Georgia. In 1965, he was one of 11 African Americans elected to the Georgia House of Representatives. They were aided by the expansion of the franchise for blacks in the state, who largely supported Democratic Party candidates, after national passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and Voting Rights Act of 1965. The latter especially had brought federal oversight to enforce the constitutional rights of blacks to vote. As states ended discriminatory practices in voter registration, African Americans regained the ability to vote and entered the political process.
Although initially undecided about his party affiliation, Bond ultimately ran and was elected as a Democrat, the party of President Lyndon B. Johnson, who had supported civil rights, and signed the Civil Rights Act and Voting Rights Act into law. On January 10, 1966, Georgia representatives voted 184–12 not to seat Bond after the election, because he had publicly endorsed SNCC's policy of opposition to United States involvement in the Vietnam War. Five of the representatives who did vote to seat Bond were white, including Republican Rodney Cook. They disliked his stated sympathy for persons who were "unwilling to respond to a military draft".
Bond took the legislature to court. A three-judge panel of the United States District Court for the Northern District of Georgia ruled in a 2–1 decision that the Georgia House had not violated any of Bond's constitutional rights. The case reached the Supreme Court of the United States in 1966, which ruled 9–0 in the case of Bond v. Floyd (385 U.S. 116) that the Georgia House of Representatives had denied Bond his freedom of speech and was required to seat him. From 1967 to 1975, Bond was elected to four terms in the Georgia House, where he organized the Georgia Legislative Black Caucus.
In January 1967, Bond was among eleven Georgia House members who refused to vote when the legislature elected segregationist Democrat Lester Maddox of Atlanta as governor of Georgia over the Republican Bo Callaway. Callaway had led in the 1966 general election by some three thousand votes. Under the Georgia Constitution of 1824, the state legislature had to settle the election because neither major party candidate had polled a majority in the general election. Former Governor Ellis Arnall polled more than fifty thousand votes as a write-in candidate, a factor which led to the impasse. Bond would not support either Maddox or Callaway, although he was ordered to vote by lame duck Lieutenant Governor Peter Zack Geer.
Throughout his House career, Bond had to deal with repeated redistricting of his district by the state legislature:
Bond was elected in 1974 for the first of six terms in the Georgia Senate, where he served from 1975 to 1987. He was a member of the Democratic Socialist Organizing Committee and its successor, the Democratic Socialists of America.
During the 1968 presidential election, Bond led an alternate delegation from Georgia to the Democratic National Convention in Chicago. There he was the first African American to have his name entered into nomination as a major-party candidate for Vice President of the United States. The 28-year-old Bond quickly declined, citing the constitutional requirement that one must be at least 35 years of age to serve in that office.