Race Man: Selected Works, 1960-2015 - Softcover

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Horace Julian Bond was a leader in the Civil Rights Movement, politician, professor and writer. In 1960, while attending Morehouse College in Atlanta, Bond was a founding member of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, leading student protests against segregation. A founder of the Southern Poverty Law Center, he served as its president in the 1970s while sitting in the Georgia House of Representatives. In 1968, Bond led a challenge delegation from Georgia to the Democratic National Congress, where he became the first African American and the youngest person to ever be nominated for Vice President of the United States, though he was ineligible due to his young age. In 1975, after ten years in the Georgia House, he served six terms in the Georgia senate, after which he taught at numerous colleges including Drexel and Harvard. In 1998, Bond was elected Board Chairman of the NAACP and, after his term, remained active as Chairman Emeritus for eleven years. He is the author of A Time To Speak, A Time To Act, a collection of his essays, as well as Black Candidates: Southern Campaign Experiences. His writing has appeared in many magazines and newspapers. He remained President Emeritus of the Southern Poverty Law Center until his death in 2015. 

Michael G. Long is the author or editor of numerous books on civil rights, religion, and politics, including We the Resistance: Documenting A History of Nonviolent Protest in the United States; Race Man: Selected Works of Julian Bond; I Must Resist: Bayard Rustin's Life in Letters; Marshalling Justice: The Early Civil Rights Letters of Thurgood Marshall; and First Class Citizenship: The Civil Rights Letters of Jackie Robinson. Long has written for the Los Angeles Times, the Chicago Tribune, ESPN’s The Undefeated, and USA Today, and his work has been featured or reviewed in the New York Times, the Washington Post, Mother Jones, and many others. Long has spoken at Fenway Park, the Central Intelligence Agency, the Smithsonian, the Library of Congress, and the National Archives, and he has appeared on MSNBC, PBS, C-SPAN, and National Public Radio.

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Editor’s Introduction by Michael G Long

I first met Julian Bond when he agreed to an interview for a book project about Martin Luther King, Jr. and gay rights. My hope was to secure a comment on Bernice King’s antigay preaching and her claim that her father, Martin Luther King, Jr., “did not take a bullet for same-sex unions.”

We met for lunch in a busy restaurant near his home in the leafy northwest section of Washington, DC. He was nattily dressed, as usual, and caught the attention of several patrons, women and men, as we walked to our seats. I was not sure whether they recognized him for his civil rights work or were just struck by his good looks and straight carriage. He and I were both about six feet tall at the time, but I vividly recall feeling much shorter as I trailed behind him.

In preparation for our time together, I discovered that Bond, unlike other civil rights leaders, Walter Fauntroy and Fred Shuttlesworth, for example, had argued for a number of years that gay rights were civil rights. “Of course they are,” he often said. “Civil rights are positive legal prerogatives—the right to equal treatment before the law. These rights are shared by all. There is no one in the United States who does not—or should not—share these rights.

Indeed, there was no other African American leader from the 1960s who so closely tied the black civil rights movement to the LGBT movement. Bond conceded that the two movements were not exactly parallel—gays do not have a history identical to slavery, and “people of color carry the badge of who we are on our faces”—but he maintained that the thread connecting the two was discrimination based on immutable characteristics. “Science has demonstrated conclusively that sexual disposition is inherent in some; it’s not an option or alternate they’ve selected,” he said. “In that regard it exactly parallels race. ... Like race, our sexuality isn’t a preference. It’s immutable, unchangeable.”

That was an unpopular position among conservative black ministers, many in the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), who regularly wielded biblical passages to condemn homosexuality as an immoral and sinful lifestyle choice. But Bond was insistent. “If your religion tells you that gay people shouldn’t get married in your church, that’s fine with me,” he said. “Just don’t let them get married in your church. But don’t stop them from getting married in city hall.” Marriage is a civil right granted by the government, not a religious right granted by churches, and religious believers “ought not to force their laws on people of different faiths or people of no faith at all.”

Bond also argued that his position was in line with the trajectory of King’s civil rights work. “I believe in my heart of hearts that were King alive today, he would be a supporter of gay rights,” Bond said. “He would see this as just another in a series of battles of justice and fair play against injustice and bigotry. He would make no distinction between this fight [for gay rights] and the fight he became famous for.”

Bernice King disagreed with that point, and Bond was well aware of King’s conservative position. In her 1966 book, Hard Questions, Heart Answers, King had sharply criticized “men who accept homosexuality as an alternative lifestyle.” Gay men aren’t “real men,” she argued, and they are to blame for “the present plight of our nation.” King continued to express her antigay theology when she joined Bishop Eddie Long’s ministerial staff at New Birth Missionary Baptist Church in Atlanta. In 2004, she and the bishop—who had long depicted gay sex as unnatural and contrary to God’s design for male and female genitals—traveled to New Zealand to offer their support to a church movement seeking the defeat of a civil union bill that would have extended legal recognition and rights to gay and lesbian couples. It was during this trip when she delivered her most memorable line to date: “I know deep down in my sanctified soul that he [Martin Luther King, Jr.] did not take a bullet for same-sex unions.”

I asked Bond about that claim, suspecting he would either offer a bit of gentle criticism or simply sidestep the question. But Bond’s genteel manners, smooth voice, and sartorial splendor belied the ferocity of his reply.

“I don’t think you can call her anything except a homophobe,” he said. “You can say she’s mistaken or uneducated or not as well-versed in things as she might be, but she’s just wrong on this. And there’s one word for that—homophobe. She’s homophobic.”

He then launched into a lengthy criticism, faulting King for refusing to read, let alone learn from, her father’s papers, and for choosing instead to follow Bishop Long and his homophobic preaching. Although he spoke in a quiet and mellifluous tone, it was clear that Bond was disgusted and angered by what he depicted as Bernice’s perversion of her father’s legacy.

That’s when I realized that I wanted to study Julian Bond. When I heard him passionately condemn Bernice King’s truncated vision of her father’s inclusive ministry, when I watched him lean forward to emphasize that the black civil rights movement was expansive rather than static, when I saw his eyes light up when speaking of his own role in the LGBT movement, and when I sensed his delight that progressive movements often claimed the mantle of the civil rights movement—that’s when I told myself that I just had to dig into the life and legacy of Julian Bond. It took some time, but this book represents the culmination of my efforts to make good on that conviction.

The next time I contacted Bond was when I invited him in 2012 to write the foreword to I Must Resist: The Life and Letters of Bayard Rustin. He accepted the invitation without hesitation and, true to form, penned a clear, concise, and compelling piece. “I knew Bayard Rustin; he was a commanding and charismatic figure,” he wrote. “I was taken by his platform personality, his way with words, and his ability to persuade.”When I read those words today, they call to mind not only Rustin but also Bond himself. Like Rustin, Bond was a commanding and charismatic figure; even a cursory review of his many video interviews will reveal as much. Like Rustin, “the intellectual bank” of the civil rights movement, Bond was a personal think tank to whom various human rights advocates would turn for credibility, wisdom, and strategic thinking. Like Rustin’s, Bond’s way with words, polished early on by black church and Quaker educators, was characterized by clear thinking, deliberate pacing, prophetic content, and intersectional analysis.

I returned to my idea of studying Bond’s life and legacy in the early days of the Trump presidency, while I was working on a book about nonviolent resistance in US history. Bond’s name kept popping up, especially in the period in which the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) issued its statement opposing the Vietnam War and calling for freedom fighters to engage in battle against racial injustice. After Bond had announced his support for the controversial statement, racist members of the Georgia state legislature, with support from the state’s white media, denied him his elected seat in the house chambers. It was a very low point in US political history, not unlike the one in which we now find ourselves—a time when...