Julian Bond, Rights Leader, Makes a Visit to Sit-in Site
By ANDREW BARRON, Staff Writer

Saturday, April 26, 1997

Civil rights leader Julian Bond comes to Greensboro to remember the sit-ins that inspired him to get involved in the movement.

Julian Bond remembers eating at a restaurant in Atlanta in February 1960 when a friend stuck a newspaper in his face and asked him if he'd seen the headline:

"Greensboro Students Sit In For Third Day."

"I said I'd seen it and thought that someone would do the same thing in Atlanta," Bond said. "Then he said, 'Why don't we do it?'"

Next thing Bond knew, he was rallying students at that restaurant to duplicate the Greensboro sit-ins in Atlanta.

He's spent the intervening 37 years at the vanguard of the civil rights movement. Bond, 57, came to Greensboro on Friday to speak at New Garden Friends Meeting, a lecture sponsored by Guilford College and Sit-In Movement Inc., organizers of the International Civil Rights Museum.

In his speech, he talked about the role the NAACP played in the civil rights movement, reminding his audience of that not-so distant - but too often overlooked - history.

Earlier in the afternoon, Bond himself got in touch with that history, visiting for the first time the spot where the sit-ins started.

He stood behind the counter where four N.C. A&T students asked for nothing more than a meal at a whites-only lunch spot.

He said their actions mobilized hundreds of thousands of people to join the civil rights movement. "

Their action democratized the civil rights movement," Bond said.

"Instead of just attorneys and ministers, now everyone could do something."

Bond fought many of those battles himself.

He helped form the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and became the group's spokesman. The group was at the forefront of student efforts to desegregate public facilities.

Starting in 1965, he was elected to four terms in the Georgia House of Representatives and then six terms in the state's Senate.

For the first two years, the state house refused to seat him. The U.S. Supreme Court eventually ruled Bond must be seated.

Bond now spends most of his time teaching, at American University in Washington and at the University of Virginia.

And while he enjoys teaching about the past and reminding his students how much better things are now, he's all too aware that much work remains to be done. "There is still the belief in white supremacy, not by all white people, but by too many," Bond said.

"I think there's nothing new to be done, we just need to keep doing the old things better."

A native of Nashville, Bond graduated from the George School, a coeducational Quaker school in Pennsylvania. He served four terms in the Georgia House of Representatives and six terms in the Georgia Senate. After an unsuccessful run at the U.S. Congress, Bond was president and founder of the Southern Elections Fund, an early political action committee that aided in the elections of rural Southern black candidates.

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