Columbus NAACP joins others in paying tribute to longtime activist Julian Bond

He is survived by his second wife, Pamela Sue Horowitz, a retired lawyer, and five children.

The news this weekend that Julian Bond passed away at 75 saddened me deeply.

People from all over the country are in mourning, as they remember the life of civil rights leader Julian Bond.

Hearing Bond’s speech changed me in ways that persist at his passing this week, leaving an indelible mark for which I am grateful. “This is a moment of incalculable loss in a trying hour of innumerable civil right challenges”, Brooks said. Realizing that young people could take risks too costly for adults with families, at 20, he helped found SNCC, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. He later returned to Morehouse to earn a degree in English. When the legislature refused to seat him because he wouldn’t condemn the symbolic burning of draft cards advocated by the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), he took his case all the way to the Supreme Court. “He was called upon time and again to write it, to express it”.

In the documentary, Bond states his father, while president of Lincoln, befriended Albert Barnes, founder of the Barnes Foundation.

“Justice and equality was the mission that spanned his life”, the statement read in part.

On November. 12, 1970 I heard Julian Bond speak at the University of Iowa Field House.

NAACP President Cornell William Brooks praised Bond’s legacy as an activist, a poet, chairman emeritus of the civil rights organization and, most recently, champion for the gay and lesbian community.

After serving in the Georgia House, Bond spent six terms in the Georgia Senate, from 1975 to 1986. He was the president of the organization between 1971 and 1979 and was a member of its board of directors at the time of his death. That usually meant keeping his cool and using his words.

Bond was often at the forefront of protests.

JULIAN BOND: That group began Atlanta’s sit-in movement, and I was arrested for the first time at the Atlanta City Hall cafeteria then. Durette said, “The state of Virginia, we will never forget him”.

Bond was “a thinker as well as a doer, ” said Charlayne Hunter-Gault, a journalist who struck up a friendship with Bond in the early 1960s, when she was one of the first two black students to attend the University of Georgia.

Mr. Bond’s blunt talk – propelled by a clear-eyed vision, leavened by his graciousness and enhanced by his ability to persuasively articulate his vision to a diversity of Americans – can be a model for these latest warriors.

“He was a writer as well as a young philosopher, ” Hunter-Gault said. And his voice was a wonder; Julian’s even, unhurried read was just the right note to accompany a story that was at turns horrifying, heartbreaking and hopeful.

“Everybody is not going to be out there in the street with their hands up or shouting”, she said. Unfortunately, the different approaches can divide people who can and should be allies, with grassroots activists getting disillusioned with elected officials (President Barack Obama is a good example) who are not able to make changes as quickly as they all would like.

“With Julian’s passing, the country has lost one of its most passionate and eloquent voices for the cause of justice”, the statement said.