Horace Julian Bond, a leading civil rights activist, was born in Nashville, Tennessee on January 14, 1940, son of Horace Mann Bond and Julia Agnes (Washington) Bond. His father became president of Lincoln University, the oldest private black college, and Julian grew up in Lincoln, Pennsylvania. In 1957 the family moved to Atlanta when his father became dean of the School of Education at Atlanta University. Julian entered Morehouse College, an historically black school in Atlanta, as an English major.
While at Morehouse, he co-founded the Committee on Appeal for Human Rights (COAHR). This organization conducted sit-ins in whites-only establishments leading to desegregation of lunch counters in Atlanta. In 1960 COAHR merged with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), a prominent civil rights group active on college campuses. Bond was working full time for the Atlanta Inquirer and eventually becoming the newspaper's managing editor, while taking part in civil rights efforts and voter-registration drives in Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, and Arkansas. With many strains on his time he dropped out of college in 1961 during his senior year and married Alice Clopton, a student at Spelman College.
Bond was elected to the Georgia House of Representatives in 1965 but his criticism of the Vietnam War angered fellow legislators who prevented him for taking his seat for over a year. In 1966 the Supreme Court ruled that he had been denied his freedom of speech and the Georgia House of Representatives had to seat him. He served until 1986 when he was defeated by John Lewis another SNCC alumnus.
Bond became the first president of the Southern Poverty Law Center in 1971 when it was founded by Morris Dees and Joseph J. Levin, Jr. He served as president emeritus for years, and today serves on its board of directors.
In 1971 he returned to Morehouse College and completed his B.A. in English. In 1973 Bond became the president of the Atlanta chapter of the NAACP. Since 1991 he has taught government at American University and, since 1993, he has taught history at the University of Virginia. In 1998 he was elected chairman of the national board of directors of the NAACP succeeding Myrlie Evers-Williams, the widow of slain civil rights activist Medgar Evers.
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