What Julian Bond Taught Me
Reading by Jeanne Theoharis
Historian Jeanne Theoharis was a student of SNCC veteran and university professor Julian Bond. She wrote this essay about lessons from Bond’s classes shortly after his death in 2015. Since then, she and Bond’s widow, Pamela Horowitz, have compiled many of Bond’s lectures in a publication called Julian Bond’s Time to Teach: A History of the Southern Civil Rights Movement.
Julian Bond on E.W. Steptoe’s farm, 1963. Photo by Harvey Richard © Paul Richard estuarypress.com
Freedom movements don’t just happen, they are made — and not by charismatic leaders, but by everyday people possessing great courage.
His lecture on the Montgomery bus boycott spanned three class periods. Professor Julian Bond traced the origins and development of the boycott in the hours and days after Rosa Parks’s arrest. Character by character, he detailed the various people who came together to turn Parks’s bus stand into a movement in Montgomery and how they sustained that effort for 382 days.
On Saturday night, Aug. 15, 2015, Julian Bond died after a brief illness. The 75-year-old civil rights leader had been a founding member of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), whose courageous direct action changed the systems of racial inequality in voting, jobs, schools, and public services in the South. Elected to the Georgia state legislature in 1965 , Bond was then denied his seat because of his opposition to the Vietnam War, fought and won it back twice, and served for 20 years, first in the House and then in the Senate. Continuing his commitment to social justice, he served as the first president of the Southern Poverty Law Center and as chairman of the NAACP. For the past 25 years, he had also been a professor at Williams College, Drexel University, the University of Pennsylvania, Harvard University, American University, and the University of Virginia.
Julian Bond was a titan of social justice leadership and a lifelong freedom fighter. But alongside that persevering voice for justice, one of his greatest gifts was that of a teacher and movement intellectual. To teach about the movement was a further way to carry it forward to a new generation — and he thrilled to this. When I was an undergraduate, I had the great good fortune to take his class on the Civil Rights Movement, and then a few years later to serve as one of his teaching assistants for that class. For over two decades, he has been an extraordinary mentor and friend. A year ago, we talked about the possibility of doing a book from those classroom teachings, but he wanted to work less, not more. His death feels ground-shifting and enormous — and so to honor that legacy, here are five things he taught me.