Profile of Julian Bond on Famous Like Me

Horace Julian Bond (b. 14 January 1940) is an American leader of the civil rights movement. While a student at Morehouse College in Atlanta, Georgia during the early 1960's, he helped found SNCC, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. Since 1998 and as of 2004, he is Chairman of the NAACP. He served in the Georgia legislature as both a Representative and as a Senator. He has been a lecturer at the University of Virginia since 1990 and a professor there since 1998. In addition, he has been a professor at American University, near his Washington, DC home, since 1991. Bond has been known to berate conservative African-Americans like former U.S. Ambassador to the UN Alan Keyes and Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas. He also has been known as a divisive figure because of his support for abortion rights and gay-marriage.

Bond was born in Nashville, Tennessee on January 14th, 1940. His family moved to Pennsylvania, when his father, Horace Bond, took a position as President of Lincoln University. Bond attended Morehouse College in Atlanta beginning in 1957. While there, he won a varsity letter for swimming. He was also instrumental in founding a literary magazine called The Pegasus and he served as an intern at Time magazine.

In 1960, Bond was a founding member of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) and served as communications director from 1961 to 1966. From 1960 to 1963, he led student protests against segregation in public facilities in Georgia.

Bond graduated from Morehouse in 1971 and helped found the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) along with Morris Dees. He was the organization's president from 1971 to 1979. The SPLC works to protect legal rights and through the courts to protect the legal rights of the poor of all races.

Five years later Bond was elected to the Georgia House of Representatives. After his election, however, the other members of the House refused to seat him because of his publicly expressed opposition to the Vietnam War. In 1966, the Supreme Court of the United States ruled that the House had denied Bond his freedom of speech and must seat him.

From 1965 to 1975, he served as a Democratic member in the Georgia House for four terms. He went on to serve six terms in the Georgia Senate, from 1975-86.

During the 1968 presidential election, Bond was the first African American nominated as Vice-President of the United States. He withdrew his name from the ballot, however, because at 28 years of age he was too young to serve.

Bond resigned from the Senate to run for the United States House of Representatives, but he lost to civil rights leader John Lewis. In the 1980's and ‘90's, Bond taught at several universities, including American, Drexel, and Harvard universities and the University of Virginia.

Bond continues with his activism as Chairman of the NAACP and working to educate the public about the history of the Civil Rights Movement and the struggles that African Americans and the poor still endure. He serves as President Emeritus of the Southern Poverty Law Center. He hosted "America's Black Forum" from 1980 until 1997 and still serves as a commentator for the show.

He also serves as a commentator for radio's "Byline" and for NBC's "Today" show. He authored the nationally-syndicated newspaper column Viewpoint. He narrated the critically-acclaimed PBS series Eyes on the Prize, in 1987 and 1990, on the life of New York Congressman Adam Clayton Powell.

He has published A Time To Speak, A Time To Act, a collection of his essays as well as Black Candidates Southern Campaign Experiences. His poems and articles have appeared in a who’s who list of magazines and newspapers.

Today Bond is a Distinguished Scholar in Residence at American University in Washington, D.C., and a faculty member in the history department at the University of Virginia.

Bond hosted Saturday Night Live on April 9, 1977.

This content from Wikipedia is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia article Julian Bond