Julian Bond.

• Author: Dreifus, Claudia
• Position: National Association for the Advancement of Colored People chairman, Julian Bond - Interview

There's a genial detachment to Julian Bond, fifty-eight, the newly elected chairman of the board of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), as he sits down for a Progressive interview at his Washington home on a recent summer's afternoon.

He is pleasant, polite, but guarded. Getting past his public mask can be a frustrating experience. One thinks of what Mary King, his former colleague from the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), wrote of Bond in her 1987 memoir, Freedom Song:

"He was also maddeningly self-contained .... Sometimes, I dreamed about Julian with ill-concealed distress over my inability to know him deeply. A key broke off in my hand in one of my dreams and in another I was searching for him, but unable to find him....I spent most of my waking hours with Julian and had so much respect for him, and there remained large areas about him that I could not penetrate."

This living enigma is a man whose personal history is intertwined with that of the modern movement for African American civil rights. The son of a distinguished educator, Dr. Horace Mann Bond, he was an early participant in the sit-ins and a founder of SNCC.

In 1965, in the wake of the Voting Rights Act's passage, Julian Bond borrowed $500 from SNCC for qualifying fees and stood for a Georgia state assembly slot from a black district in downtown Atlanta. Bond won that election--but Georgia legislators twice refused to seat him because of his opposition to the then-escalating war in Vietnam. Three years later, at twenty-eight, he became the first African American and the youngest person ever to have his name placed in nomination for Vice President at a Democratic Party convention.

For almost twenty years, he served in the state legislature. Then, in 1986, he decided to make a try for a Congressional seat that had opened up in the Atlanta area. His opponent in the Democratic Party primary was his old colleague from SNCC, John Lewis. It was a hard-fought, extremely bitter campaign-which saw Lewis raising "character issues" and demanding, among other things, that Bond sit for a drug test. Lewis carried the vote.

Bond hasn't slowed down a bit. He has been making a living as a writer/teacher/television host. It is his voice that narrates the 1987 public-television series on the civil-rights movement, Eyes on the Prize. Bond also appears weekly on the syndicated television show America's Black Forum. Still, he finds time to teach civil-rights history at the University of Virginia and American University.

Q: Much of the coverage of your election to the chairmanship of the NAACP board has been of the tone, "Ah, Julian Bond, the NAACP has saved him from obscurity." How do you react to this take on your life story?

Julian Bond: Annoyed. Ever since I've become chairman, there have been profiles of me in People, George, The Washington Post, The Detroit News, and all of them could have been written by the same person. They all make the same three points. One: that when I was young I had tremendous--but never realized--promise. Two: that after I lost the 1986 Congressional election, I vanished. And three: all of a sudden, the NAACP has rescued me from oblivion. Now, I don't think that's a true picture, and I kind of resent it.

Think about it: I was a Georgia state legislator for a great many years. I've appeared on a weekly syndicated television show since 1980. Over the last ten years, I've taught at Harvard-twice. I now teach at American University and the University of Virginia. That's not chicken feed! So I resent the idea that the NAACP came and picked me up, and here I am! I've been here all along.

Q: There's a theory about people of our political generation: We had such enormous impact when we were...