Bond remembered for civil rights work after his death at 75

Watch the full HuffPost Live conversation about civil rights leader Julian Bond in the video above.

Pamela Horowitz told The Associated Press on Sunday that her husband “never took his eyes off the prize”, which was always racial equality. Bond died Saturday at the age 75.

President Obama called him a “hero and, I’m privileged to say, a friend” whose quest for justice and equality “spanned his life”.

At a time when keeping one’s cool was perhaps more important to civil rights than at any stage of the movement before and perhaps any since, Julian Bond seldom if ever lost his.

Denise Rolark Barnes, Chairperson of the NNPA and publisher of The Washington Informer, observed that Bond’s “lifelong dedication and commitment to political and economic empowerment, journalistic diversity and integrity, and educational equality served as a beacon for others to follow”.

ELLIOTT: Bond recently taught civil rights history at the University of Virginia and would lead annual pilgrimages south to tour key landmarks from the movement.

Parker said what made Bond so unique was that he identified problems and worked to find the best solution.

Bond expanded his horizons, making even more enemies in the establishment with a strong opposition to the Vietnam war. Then came his work as one of the founders of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, organized by black college students to stage sit-ins throughout the South.

The Tennessee native went on to become chairman of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) and was the first president of the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC).

Bond was often at the forefront of protests against segregation.

Bond’s activism actually began years before that. Bond’s explanation? Harris, he said, “did not deserve the support of black people” because she was backed by “the forces determined to keep black people from participating” in the party’s raucous and divided 1968 convention.

“He was a writer as well as a young philosopher”, Hunter-Gault said. Bond was candid, Watson said.

“Everybody is not going to be out there in the street with their hands up or shouting”, she said.

CHARLIE COBB: That young people committed to change can actually make a difference, and that struggle continues from youth to old age.

ELLIOTT: The appearance caught the attention of Montgomery attorney Morris Dees, who went on to co-found the Southern Poverty Law Center.

“He advocated not just for African-Americans but for every group, indeed every person subject to oppression and discrimination, because he recognized the common humanity in us all”, Dees said.

This was a weekend of a presidential-wannabe’s rite of political passage as an impossibly awkward slate of more than a dozen candidates, high and low, Democrats and Republicans, puzzled partisans and followers of those beyond category like the leprechaunish Bernie Sanders and the gaudy, wholly self-enamored Donald Trump, descending, like a character out of a Fellini movie unto the farming and fawning earth of Des Moines, Iowa, in a setting that couldn’t have gotten more surreal.

RICHARDSON: It hasn’t yet sunk in ’cause Julian was just amusing as hell, you know, and he was always a presence.

Julian Bond was a leader of exceptional clarity.

Funeral arrangements have not yet been made but Bond’s family said they plan on cremating Bond and scattering his ashes in the Gulf of Mexico.