If anyone knew the importance of a college education, it was Julian Bond.
Bond, who died Saturday night at age 75 after a brief illness, grew up on a college campus.
In 1945, his father, Dr. Horace Mann Bond, became the first Black president of Lincoln University, a historically Black college in Pennsylvania, relocating his family, including 5-year-old Julian, from Georgia to the rural HBCU campus about 50 miles outside Philadelphia.
But it was Bond’s role as a young organizer with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) that solidified his presence within the burgeoning Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s and catapulted him to national fame. He served as the communications director for SNCC and played a critical role in organizing voter registration drives and protesting Jim Crow laws throughout the American South.
Although he dropped out of Morehouse College, Bond later returned and earned a degree in English in 1971, the same year that he co-founded the Southern Poverty Law Center, a nonprofit that combats hate, intolerance and discrimination through education and litigation.
It was 50 years ago that Bond won his first run for office and was elected to the Georgia House of Representatives. But his fellow legislators voted 184-12 not to seat him because he had publicly supported SNCC’s policy in opposing U.S. involvement in the Vietnam war. It took a U.S. Supreme Court decision to overturn the legislators’ actions, and he later went on to serve in the Georgia State Senate until 1987.
By the late 1980s, Bond was seemingly everywhere. He was hosting the public service talk show America’s Black Forum, writing a nationally syndicated newspaper column and narrating the popular PBS series Eyes on the Prize. He served as a videoconference moderator for Black Issues In Higher Education, the predecessor to Diverse: Issues In Higher Education. He was also popular on the campus lecture circuit and taught at several institutions, including Drexel University, Harvard and the University of Pennsylvania.
