Remembering Julian Bond -

[TBF]

Shortly after Fidel Castro's rise to power in Cuba, Julian Bond visited that country to witness, first-hand, the effects of Castro's revolution. Decades later, in a 2006 interview, Bond would recall: “I first visited Cuba in the spring of 1959 ... with three college friends.... The truth was we were enchanted by the revolution. Our newspapers had carried stories about President Castro’s triumphant entry into Havana. He and his colleagues were all young, as were we—I was 19—and we found something appealing in their story and their victory. This last trip [in November 2006] simply reinforced my admiration for the Cuban people and the society they are building.”

In 1971 Bond returned to Morehouse College to complete his undergraduate studies, earning a bachelor's degree in English.

Also in 1971, Bond collaborated with Morris Dees to co-found the Southern Poverty Law Center. Bond became the organization's first president, and he continues to sit on its board of directors to this day.

In 1973 Bond was an “initiator” of the Democratic Socialist Organizing Committee, forerunner of Democratic Socialists of America (DSA). Other notable initiators included Heather Booth, John Conyers, and Ron Dellums. Bond went on to become a member of DSA.

Shortly after a 1974 pro-communist military coup in Portugal, Bond and more than eighty fellow American leftists sent a cablegram to to the Portugese Armed Forces Movement, Portugese President Francisco da Costa Gomes, and Portugese socialist leader Mario Soares, expressing the hope that “democratic freedoms … will continue to grow in Portugal.” Other signers of that letter included Noam Chomsky, Barbara Ehrenreich, Daniel Ellsburg, Michael Harrington, Herbert Marcuse, and Paul Sweezy.

In the reports from the New York Times and others you will only read about Mr. Bond's establishment activities later in life -

... a former chairman of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, a charismatic figure of the 1960s civil rights movement, a lightning rod of the anti-Vietnam War campaign and a lifelong champion of equal rights for minorities, died on Saturday night, according to the Southern Poverty Law Center. He was 75.

But DSA always appreciated his courage and hard work in fighting the inequality he witnessed:

In 1993 the Democratic Socialists of America's Eugene V. Debs/Norman Thomas/Michael Harrington Dinner Committee, named in honor of three prominent American socialists, presented Bond with an award at its annual dinner banquet. The award specifically cited Bond's “lifetime as a leader in the movement for social justice.”

We here in the Socialists Progressives group mourn our comrade, Horace Julian Bond.

http://www.discoverthenetworks.org/individualProfile.asp?indid=642
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/08/17/us/julian-bond-former-naacp-chairman-and-civil-rights-leader-dies-at-75.html?hp&action=click&pgtype=Homepage&module=photo-spot-region®ion=top-news&WT.nav=top-news&_r=0