>> My name is Olivia Field, I am the public relations Katherine Conroy Intern
at the Hood Museum of Art.
>> And I'm Bruce Nelson, an Emeritus Professor of History,
taught at Dartmouth beginning in 1985.
>> So could you please describe who Julian Bond is and what he's best known for.
>> Okay, Julian Bond has a long and distinguished career,
I think I'll talk a little bit about his life even before he had a career.
He was born in 1940 in Nashville, Tennessee, his father, Horace Mann Bond,
was a distinguished Black educator in the age of segregation and affiliated
with several important universities.
His mother Julia, was a former librarian at Clark University in Atlanta,
and that's important because Julian Bond has lived much of his life in Atlanta.
He attended the George School in Pennsylvania, a Quaker-affiliated school in Pennsylvania,
and then went from there to Morehouse University in Atlanta,
part of the Clark University complex in Atlanta.
And that was Martin Luther King's alma mater also, King entered Morehouse at,
believe it or not at the age of 15.
>> Oh wow.
>> So Julian was there in the early 1960s and that was the beginning of a new stage
of the Civil Rights Movement and Atlanta played a very important role in that,
not only because it had a kind of big infrastructure you might say
in Black community life, but also because the colleges
and universities there became spawning grounds for Civil Rights activism.
And Julian became part of the founding
of an organization called the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, or SNCC, in 1960,
and he played a very important and highly visible role in SNCC
because he was their director of communications from 1961 to 1966.
But, to put it kind of in the vernacular, SNCC was the most energetic
of the Civil Rights organizations at that time period, and the most youthful,
after all it was a self-consciously student organization,
and you saw SNCC charting its own course and being aggressive
and militant and sometimes controversial.
They, for example they took an early position in opposition of the war in Vietnam
when few organizations were doing that in the United States, and Julian was very much a part
of that, from 1961 to 1966, were his main years of involvement with SNCC,
and then he actually ran for a seat in the Georgia House of Representatives.
He was elected to the House of Representatives, but because he had taken a public position
in opposition to the war in Vietnam, the House voted, 187 to 12, to refuse to allow him
to take his seat, they saw his actions as treasonous.
And his case, he then sued to be able to take his seat and his appeal went all the way
to the Supreme Court, which voted nine to nothing in his favor and, it was called Bond
versus Floyd I believe, and the Supreme Court directed the Georgia House
of Representatives to allow him to take his seat.
So he was active in politics for many years, and then, in the late 1980s,
he ran for a Congressional seat, and he lost
to another very famous Civil Rights activist named John Lewis, he was defeated by John Lewis
in the primary, and since the district was overwhelmingly African American Lewis was
elected and Julian kind of missed out on that opportunity so to speak,
but he had served a fair, you know more than ten years
in the Georgia House and then in the Georgia Senate.
He finally became the president of the National Association for the Advancement
of Colored People, the famous NAACP,
probably the most historic Civil Rights organization in the United States.
He became chairman of the NAACP in 1998, and he held that position until 2010.
He also became very active as an academic, and he actually had a position at the University
of Virginia, so it may be appropriate to address him, at least on occasion, as Professor Bond.
>> Okay.
>> And he also came to Dartmouth and, I don't know if you want to ask me about that but,
he came to Dartmouth in the winter of 1986.
At the time he was involved in this race for the Congressional seat I believe.
He came to Dartmouth in January of 1986, and this was the time of the quote "shanties
on the Green" unquote, a number of Dartmouth students, a few faculty members,
including myself, a number of people from the community, had erected shanties on the Green,
right in the center of the Green, in order to protest Dartmouth's investment
in companies doing business in apartheid South Africa.
The shanties symbolized the Black townships, most famously Soweto, in South Africa,
Soweto is a Black township in Johannesburg.
And so the shanties were meant to symbolize the appalling conditions
under which Black South Africans were compelled to live, and so that was the very idea,
you know, call attention to that, this was part
of a much wider national and international movement.
The college trustees basically were very reluctant to divest from those companies,
many of them, like the automobile, the big automobile companies like General Motors,
you know they were among the largest corporations in the United States and the world
and were very profitable, you know, so divestment didn't strike them as a good idea.
>> Yeah.
>> But there was a lot of pressure from students and the shanties got erected on the Green,
a number of students from The Dartmouth Review came out one night
and tried to tear down the shanties.
It just so happened that on a very cold night several women students were actually asleep
in one of the shanties, they were kind of taking their turn on guard so to speak,
and this led to a sit-in in the president's office, it led to the cancellation of classes
for a day of reflection and dialogue, and a couple of years later the college finally,
and I must say somewhat reluctantly, divested its holdings
in companies doing business in South Africa.
But that was really one of the more famous moments
if you will in Dartmouth's recent history.
But Julian came and spoke in the aftermath of the episode on the Green,
and it was a very cold winter, and he referred
to the students who'd been manning these shanties as winter soldiers,
which was a reference to George Washington's troops
at Valley Forge during the American Revolution.
How they had suffered and sacrificed, you know, for the cause of American independence
and here you have these winter soldiers at Dartmouth, these students suffering
and sacrificing and, for the cause of divestment.
So his, I remember vividly his visit to Dartmouth in 1986,
and hopefully he will have some recollection of it as well.
>> Did that really affect Julian Bond's, his visit to Dartmouth and what he spoke about?
>> Yeah it was very much, you know that, it was very much what he spoke about, yeah.
I don't know what his original intention was when he was invited, he might have been invited
on very short notice precisely because of this issue coming to a head, but in any case,
you know he was here, and he addressed this issue, he also, so he spoke at a rally
out on the Green, I remember it, a big circle of people, and then he spoke in,
I think he spoke at Cook auditorium, and in Cook auditorium he very much addressed the issue
of the struggle against apartheid in South Africa, the worldwide struggle against apartheid
in South Africa and, you know, saw the Dartmouth students' struggle
as very much a part of that worldwide phenomena.
>> You also mentioned that you, it was your first year as a faculty member...
>> Yes.
>> ...when he came to talk, how did that influence you and sort of your role in,
both at Dartmouth as well as in these protests specifically?
>> Well I'm not sure this should be about me all that much but this was my first year
at Dartmouth, I was something of an activist for many years before I came and so as soon
as I saw the, there was a rally I remember early in the fall term,
it was a beautiful autumn day I remember, and there were quite a few people there
and I was there, I went to it and I was quite happy to see all of this activity,
and so I was very happy to identify with what the students were trying to do,
there were a number of other faculty members involved as well.
And, yeah, you know just, it seemed like, to me like the right thing to do,
a very important thing to do and I, in many ways I was happy to follow the students' lead
in this case, because they were going to act without, with or without support
from the faculty and members of the community,
although as I said they did have some faculty support, and they did have support
of an active participation of some members of the community.
>> So what exactly was Julian Bond's role in the Civil Rights Movement
after he had left Morehouse College?
>> Well as I said he was a student at Morehouse and he withdrew before he graduated,
he later did complete his degree, but, his studies for his degree but he,
Morehouse and that whole set of, Atlanta University complex, became a,
Spellman College for example, a women's college, very important sites of Civil Rights activism
and a very important kind of incubator of student activists who then went
on to become full time workers in the Civil Rights Movement, many of them dropping
out of school and not completing their studies
because they placed a higher priority on the Civil Rights struggle.
And so Julian Bond, I believe dropped out of Morehouse in 1961 and,
as I said he became a full time worker for SNCC, he was their director of communications
from 1961 to 1966 and, as I said, SNCC was famous because it had a kind of,
how shall I put it, a kind of fearlessness that was unusual,
it went places where others were fearful about treading so to speak.
And so it was very active in a phenomenon called the Freedom Rides in 1961,
where they were trying to desegregate interstate commerce on Greyhound and Trailways buses
for example, and that became a major site of struggle and violence and nonviolent response
on the part of these students and so on.
And also they, SNCC became very active in the state of Mississippi,
and other parts of the rural South, which were much more dangerous in the urban South and,
there were no cameras, you know, in the rural South you know what I mean?
There was no news coverage, there was no shield of protection, people were operating
on their own out there and white supremacy was deeply entrenched
and the Ku Klux Klan was deeply entrenched, and so SNCC showed really remarkable,
some said insane, courage in going into these areas, and Julian Bond was right there,
you know he was very much a part of that.
Even though he was based in Atlanta and his job so to speak was Atlanta based,
he was very much a participant in those kinds of struggles, some of them,
you know among the most famous Civil Rights struggles of that time period.
For example Freedom Summer in Mississippi in 1964, or as I said earlier the Freedom Rides
in 1961 that carried over into 1962 and so on.
>> You yourself have also been described as a Civil Rights activist, can you describe sort
of your role that you played in the Civil Rights Movement, if any?
>> Well [Laughing] I was a bit player okay, there were huge numbers
of people became involved in the Civil Rights Movement.
Certainly I graduated from college in 1962, and already by that time I had a sense
that what was happening in the South, especially the movement, or the section of the movement led
by Martin Luther King Jr. and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference,
I had a feeling that what they were doing also was very important to my life and my future
and I think that turned out to be the case.
And so even though I continued in school for a while, I got married, we had children,
you know the whole nine yards, I tried to be active
in the Civil Rights Movement whenever I could, and that usually meant participating in marches,
participating in demonstrations and so on.
I participated in a sit-in in the California State Capitol around issues of fair housing.
And my 15 minutes of fame occurred in Selma, Alabama in 1965 when I went
to join what became the famous Selma to Montgomery march around the issue
of voting rights, which led to the passage of the Voting Rights Act of 1965.
So, you know I had my moments, I was there whenever I could be,
I felt that it was a tremendously important force, not only in the life of the nation
but in my life, and you know I'm very grateful that I was able to do that.
>> So were you familiar with Julian Bond and SNCC at the time when you?
>> Oh yes, yes.
I was a graduate student at Berkeley and there was a group there called the Friends of SNCC
which had a presence in Berkley, I was, eventually I lived in San Francisco
and I was a member of a predominantly Black church there and friends of,
it was a SNCC organizing project out of the basement of our church and,
so I had the good fortune to have lots of interaction with people in SNCC and this Friends
of SNCC organization in San Francisco and then Berkeley and, you know that helped guide me
to the places where I felt I needed to be.
>> So there's a photo of Julian Bond taken by Richard Avedon actually currently on display
in the Witness exhibit and you actually helped write the, some of the label for that,
could you maybe expand a little more on the photo?
>> Yes it's a, it's a photo which Julian Bond is front and center,
and I believe he's the only person mentioned by name in Avedon's own commentary.
But, one of the things that photo says to me is it, practically a dozen people kind of crowded
into the photo and Julian, as I said is in the forefront,
but what it emphasizes is the youthfulness of this movement,
especially the movement associated with SNCC, that operated sort of in the orbit of SNCC
so to speak, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee.
And you see, behind Julian you see a young man named Bob Zellner, who was one of the few whites
who were active in SNCC in the rural South, and you also see a number of women and you,
young black women, and you see a number of young black males who might have been as young as,
you know 12 to 15 years old and so on.
And what that says to me powerfully is the youthfulness of this movement,
the success of SNCC in particular in mobilizing large numbers of young people to kind
of take control of their own destiny so to speak.
And, you know SNCC did that brilliantly and people like Julian Bond and Bob Zellner,
and a number of the other, the so-called nameless people in the picture,
you know they were both a reflection of that and played an important role in doing
that themselves, or at least that's the way I would interpret the picture.
>> Well thank you so much Professor Nelson for coming to speak with us today.
>> You're welcome it was my pleasure.
>> Please join us on Thursday, October 30th at 4:30 PM in the Hood auditorium
for a discussion with Julian Bond. ------------------------------5ec2402b2ae5--