Saturday, August 29, 2015
For those on the front lines of the struggles for civil rights, human rights and economic justice in this region and in this nation over the past six decades, Julian Bond always could be counted on to excel as a towering ally and an exceptional leader.
Mr. Bond, who died last week in Florida at 75 from complications of vascular disease, was no stranger to residents of Northeast Ohio and Greater Youngstown. Through dozens of visits – from his May 1968 speech before the Youngstown Negro Business and Professional Women’s Club to his January 2015 Martin Luther King Jr. Day address at Kent State University – Bond electrified his audiences with his boyish charisma, inspiring eloquence and concrete record of victories in the trenches of some of this country’s most important civil-rights battles.
Through it all, the founding member of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee also embodied a remarkable study in contrasts.
Mr. Bond, after all, was born of privilege but fought doggedly for those for whom privilege had eluded. He was the son of a university president father and a university librarian mother, but he never let his prep-school trappings blind him to the horrid realities of prejudice, discrimination and racism that surrounded him.
Julian Bond also walked and spoke softly but, like Teddy Roosevelt, carried a big and threatening stick. From his arrest in Atlanta City Hall in 1960 for leading a group of SNCC protesters in attempting to desegregate the cafeteria there to his apprehension in 2013 for civil disobedience in front of the White House for his opposition to the Keystone Pipeline, Mr. Bond never was afraid to follow up eloquent arguments with forceful – yet nonviolent – actions.
UNITY AND ALIENATION
Yet another contrast that Mr. Bond embodied throughout his life was the duality of his ability to unify many behind his goals for positive change while at the same time alienating many others. In the early days of his civil-rights service, millions of black Americans embraced his philosophies while millions of white Americans vilified him for them. In recent years, Bond fell victim to alienation by several powerful black leaders and institutions because of his impassioned support for marriage equality, a position that the U.S. Supreme Court validated for Mr. Bond shortly before his death.
In spite of such conflicts throughout his life, Julian Bond stood powerfully as one of this nation’s most successful agents of positive change through nonviolence. He did so through his writings, his service for 16 years in the Georgia Legislature, his leadership in the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, his founding of the Southern Poverty Law Center and in his speaking engagements in the Mahoning Valley and throughout the world.
Throughout it all, however, Mr. Bond always remained a stark realist, unwilling to sugarcoat remnants of white supremacy and economic injustice that he viewed as still festering among us today.
At his speech earlier this year at Kent State, Bond poignantly reminded his audience of the continuing challenges in battling racism and of its roots in this nation’s founding fabric.
“America is race from its symbolism to its substance; from its founding by slaveholders to its remedy by the Civil War; from Johnny Rebel to Jim Crow; from the Ku Klux Klan to [Hurricane] Katrina; from Emmett Till to Trayvon Martin to Michael Brown,” he said.
Those who seek to continue the tireless work of advancing civil rights to the next level would do well to emulate the tireless service, the passionate commitment and humble yet forceful style of Julian Bond.