Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: TUESDAY, May 4, 1993 TAG: 9305040374
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: C1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: HERBERT LOWE LANDMARK NEWS SERVICE
DATELINE: CHARLOTTESVILLE LENGTH: Long
He's misty-eyed just thinking about it.
Not about helping to start Atlanta's sit-in protests in 1960. Or watching badly beaten friends hover near death. That all came with the struggle.
What still touches Julian Bond is Martin Luther King Jr.'s story about the Montgomery, Ala., bus boycott in the 1950s. It helps Bond, the former Georgia legislator and one-time rising star of the civil rights movement, put his own life in perspective.
Bond sets the scene: "He's alone in the kitchen of his house. It's late at night and he is feeling so bad. He's under attack. The movement isn't going well and people are questioning his honesty and integrity.
"And he says to himself, `You can't call on Daddy now; Daddy's 150 miles away in Atlanta. You can't call on Mama now. You've got to call on the one who makes a way when there's no way.' "
Then, Bond said, God spoke to King. "He said, `Martin, I'll never leave you alone.' "
So, King told Bond, "I'm never alone. Never alone. No, never alone."'
Bond, 53, leans back from his desk in his office at the University of Virginia, where he teaches two courses: History of the Civil Rights Movement and Southern Black Politics.
It's a 2 1/2-hour commute from his home in Washington, one he'll be making through at least 1996. He taught at UVa for a semester in 1990 and likes its commitment to history, particularly African-American studies. UVa already houses 5,500 papers and photographs from the Southern Elections Fund, which Bond founded and once headed. From 1968 to 1975 the organization helped elect black politicians.
And the university, Bond says, is just the place to serve as headquarters for an ambitious oral history project he's leading to record the names and memories of those who contributed even in the smallest way to the movement.
Bond is "tremendously curious" about the unknown players who shaped American history.
"Until fairly recently, the movement has been written about as though Martin Luther King was the whole story of the movement," said Bond, who has been described as working to resist the "deification" of King.
Bond must get private funding for the history project, which would be housed in UVa's Alderman Library. He hopes to raise $150,000 by 1996 and train students to interview people, "starting with the oldest first."
"Each one of these people has a story to tell," he said. "And somebody's got to get it because they're dying. We're dying."
In his mind's eye, it's the early 1960s. Blacks face a web of discrimination in housing, jobs, voting rights, criminal justice - in practically every aspect of their lives.
The Morehouse College student joined the movement when a friend urged him to help start sit-ins in a segregated Atlanta store.
Bond soon became communications director of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee, edited the organization's newsletter and worked in voter-registration drives in the deep South.
By 1965, Bond asked people to cast ballots for him. He was elected to the Georgia House of Representatives, only to have fellow legislators refuse to seat him because he had denounced the war in Vietnam. It took two more elections and a U.S. Supreme Court ruling before he was seated.
At the 1968 Democratic National Convention, he became the first black person nominated for vice president. He withdrew because he was too young to serve. Bond went on to serve two decades in the Georgia Legislature - eight years in the House, 12 in the Senate.
After Bond gave up his state Senate seat in 1986 to run for Congress, he was outhustled by his friend from the movement, John Lewis.
Then things really began to fall apart.
In 1987, Bond's wife of 28 years alleged that he had been using cocaine. He denied the charge, but his subsequent weight loss and increasingly haggard look prompted many to wonder. Bond's marriage ended in divorce in 1989, and he immediately was hit with a paternity suit filed by a former girlfriend. He later admitted fathering the child.
Julian Bond knows what people say about him: He didn't live up to his potential. That he could have been another King or Jesse Jackson.
"I'm flattered," Bond said. "But you have to do in life what you think is best. You can't fulfill other people's dreams. I feel that I'm at the most productive point in my life."
In any case, Bond insists the movement has not passed him by. He's just active in a different way. Until last year, he was a director of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. He still makes speeches across the country, telling people not only what has happened but what needs to happen.
Bond sometimes wonders if students are listening.
"College students today are so grade-oriented that it frightens me to see the note-taking they engage in," he said. That's why Bond keeps linking the past to the future, to help students better understand.
Bond knows they may never fully appreciate what they owe the people listed in textbooks.
"My own children would say to me, `Daddy, I wouldn't have sat in the back of the bus.' And I say, `Yes, you would have. We all did.' It was sit in the back of the bus or get beaten or get thrown off the bus. And my oldest boys would say, `Oh Daddy, not me. I would have beat the white man up.' "
At least Bond's children know what role he played in the movement. Many students apparently haven't talked about such things with their parents.
"The students usually tell me, `Oh, Mom and Dad didn't do anything.' It turns out that Mom and Dad did a lot more than they thought. They come back to me and say, `I don't know why Mom and Dad never told me before, but Mom got arrested with Stokely Carmichael and Dad did this' and so forth."
Bond understands that parents don't want to relive bitter or embarrassing memories. But they must, he said, because the movement is far from over.
"It will end when racial discrimination ends," he said.
And that's not likely soon.
"I don't think you will ever eliminate feelings of superiority. As long as people can see difference - because someone's eyes are slanter, their skin is a different color, their hair is something - somebody's going to impute something bad into that. But what you can do is stop people from acting on it. And when that day comes, then the movement can say, `We've done our job.' "
by CNB