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U.S. legislator and black civil-rights leader
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HORACE JULIAN BOND (b. Jan. 14, 1940, Nashville, Tenn., U.S.), U.S. legislator and black civil-rights leader, best known for his fight to take his duly elected seat in the Georgia House of Representatives.
The son of prominent educators, Bond attended Morehouse College in Atlanta (B.A., 1971), where he helped found a civil-rights group and led a sit-in movement intended to desegregate Atlanta lunch counters.
In 1960 Bond joined in creating the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), and he later served as communications director for the group. In 1965 he won a seat in the Georgia state legislature, but his endorsement of a SNCC statement accusing the United States of violating international law in Vietnam prompted the legislature to refuse to admit him.
The voters in his district twice reelected him, but each time, the legislature barred him. Finally, in December 1966, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled the exclusion unconstitutional, and Bond was sworn in on Jan. 9, 1967.
At the Democratic National Convention in 1968, Bond led an insurgent group of delegates that won half the Georgia seats. He seconded the nomination of Eugene McCarthy and became the first black man to have his name placed in nomination for the vice presidential candidacy of a major party. Younger than the minimum age required for the position under the Constitution, however, Bond withdrew his name.
Bond served in the Georgia House of Representatives from 1967 to 1975 and in the Georgia Senate from 1975 to 1987. In 1986 he ran unsuccessfully for a seat in the U.S. House of Representatives. In addition to his legislative activities, Bond served as president of the Southern Poverty Law Center and as regional president of the Atlanta National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP).
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