Julian Bond

Julian Bond did not take the usual route to the classroom. Long before he began teaching civil rights history at the University in 1992, Bond had earned a reputation as an activist, politician, journalist and even an actor, holding speaking parts in several movies, most recently in the 2004 film “Ray.”

For the past several years, Bond has divided his time between professorships at U.Va. and at American University in Washington, D.C. — and, since 1998, has been chairman of the NAACP. But after commuting from Washington to Charlottesville twice a week for 14 years — a commute that has become increasingly difficult with roadwork and highway congestion — Bond will retire from the University in May.

From his first days at U.Va., Bond has found his students to be “both bright and eager.” Yet what most distinguishes U.Va. undergraduates from those at, say, Harvard (one of several universities where Bond has held visiting professorships), is their strong connection to the history he is teaching. Many of his students are Southerners for whom civil rights history is local history, and their engagement with the course material reflects a particularly personal fascination. He recalls one student who was astonished to learn that her hometown of Danville, Va., was the first place in the modern civil rights movement where fire hoses and dogs were used against protestors.

Many college students enter Bond’s classes with what he calls “the American civil rights narrative,” a narrow storyline that tends to consider the movement primarily through the lens of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s involvement. But the narrative Bond teaches is “much broader and much richer and much deeper,” he says, adding that “there were many, many, many more people involved in the civil rights movement than Martin Luther King.”

In his course on the history of civil rights, Bond traces the movement from its origins at the beginning of the 20th century to its culmination in the 1950s and ’60s. He touches on such features of the movement as the work of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC) and the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), court decisions and congressional acts, affirmative action, communist involvement and black power. The story Bond teaches is “regionally and locally based.” It is also a story he lived himself as a student at Morehouse College in the early ’60s, when he helped to found a student civil rights organization as well as the SNCC, for which he eventually served as communications director.

“Julian Bond’s class is one of the two or three classes that it seems every U.Va. student ‘must’ take before he or she leaves Charlottesville,” says Dean Edward L. Ayers. “I’ve talked to hundreds of those who have been through the course and they uniformly pronounce it one of the best at the University. Julian’s class teaches a crucial part of the American past; it also teaches how to maintain hope in the future."

While some social critics fault today’s college students for lacking the passion of students of the ’60s — the kind of passion without which the civil rights movement might never have taken place — Bond finds his students to be a fairly socially conscious group. With 180 students each semester he hesitates to generalize about the whole group, but “in every class, every semester, there are always some students who are involved in social justice-type work,” he says.

Yet Bond notes that, unlike the activists of his generation, today’s socially active students tend to focus on individuals rather than groups. While the emphasis on human interaction and one-on-one work certainly has its benefits, he believes that at times it stems from a desire to “treat the effect rather than the cause” of social problems. He attributes this in part to the American impulse to want to “fix it right now.”

Bond is quick to acknowledge, however, that even the students who don’t fall under the “activist” label can still help to achieve lasting social change. “You can’t think it was just the marches, speeches and protests” that brought about the end of segregation in the South, he says. “It was a changing of the American mind. And the protests helped a lot, but it had to be non-protestors in the end who said, ‘This  situation is wrong and it has to change.’”

Of course, activism has its own rewards. Bond says he may never know the full impact of his teaching because he does not see the majority of his students after graduation, but he can see the very visible results of the work he did as an activist in the ’60s. “I know that black people in Atlanta can eat in restaurants downtown because of my work and the work of many, many others.”

Bond may never know the full impact of his years at the University, but at least one former student attests to hisinfluence as a teacher. According to Tyler Scriven (American Studies ’05), Bond’s intimacy with his subject made him a powerful presence in the classroom. But the conversations that Scriven holds most dear took place outside the classroom, in Bond's office or over lunch at the College Inn. They often discussed matters other than civil rights history — boxing or Bond’s most recent travels, for instance — but in certain “rare and unforgettable moments,” Bond would convey some piece of history in a deeply personal way.

“In those moments,” Scriven says, “he would briefly take me back in time, give me an amazing perspective on what was his reality, and without me even realizing it, teach me an even more important lesson about the future.”

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From his student days to his current chairmanship of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), Julian Bond has been an active participant in the movements for civil rights and economic justice. As an activist who has faced jail for his convictions, as a veteran of more than 20 years’ service in the Georgia General Assembly, as a university professor and as a writer, he has been on the cutting edge of social change since 1960.

He was a founder, in 1960, while a student at Morehouse College, of the Atlanta student sit-in and anti-segregation organization and of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). As SNCC’s communications director, Bond was active in protests and registration campaigns throughout the South.

Elected in 1965 to the Georgia House of Representatives, Bond was prevented from taking his seat by members who objected to his opposition to the Vietnam War. He was reelected to his own vacant seat and unseated again, and seated only after a third election and a unanimous decision of the United States Supreme Court.

He was co-chair of a challenge delegation from Georgia to the 1968 Democratic Convention. The challengers were successful in unseating Georgia’s regular Democrats, and Bond was nominated for Vice President but had to decline because he was too young.

Bond serves as chairman of the Premier Auto Group PAG (Volvo, Land Rover, Aston-Martin, Jaguar) Diversity Council and is on the boards of the Southern Poverty Law Center and the Council for a Livable World and the advisory board of the Harvard Business School Initiative on Social Enterprise, among many others.

He is a commentator on America’s Black Forum, the oldest black-owned show in television syndication. His poetry and articles have appeared in numerous publications. He has narrated many documentaries, including the Academy Award-winning “A Time for Justice” and the prize-winning and critically acclaimed series “Eyes on the Prize.”

He has served since 1998 as chairman of the board of the NAACP, the oldest and largest civil rights organization in the United States. In 2002, he received the prestigious National Freedom Award.

Adapted with permission from naacp.org.

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An alumni group is working with U.Va. to raise money for an endowment named for Bond and to promote the study of civil rights history at U.Va. For more information, contact Marcia Inger at 434-924-0729.