• NAACP's current Chairman
• Co-founder of the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee in the 1960s

Horace Julian Bond was born in Nashville, Tennessee in 1940.  His father was Dr. Horace Mann Bond, later to become President of Lincoln University in Oxford, Pennsylvania, America's oldest black college. Julian Bond attended Morehouse College in Atlanta, where he co-founded the Committee on Appeal for Human Rights and the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). The latter organization would be taken over by Stokely Carmichael in 1966 and H. Rap Brown in 1967.

In 1961 Bond joined the staff of the Atlanta Inquirer and was elected to the Georgia State Assembly four years later. But the Assembly refused to seat Bond, citing his endorsement of a SNCC directive that urged young black men to illegally avoid the military draft. A second election, and then a third, yielded the same result, and in 1967 the U.S. Supreme Court, for the first time in American history, overruled a state legislature’s right to establish and maintain its own qualifications for seating members.

In the interim, Bond had become a celebrity. He was endorsed by the Communist Party, participated in Communist political forums, and campaigned for Communist and leftwing politicians, in addition to urging blacks to resist the draft.

Bond also took part in the increasingly radicalized anti-war movement of the late 1960s, at one point endorsing Dick Gregory and Benjamin Spock as presidential candidates. He led a move to unseat the legitimately selected Georgia delegation at the 1968 Democratic Presidential convention in Chicago. And he testified on behalf of the infamous Chicago Seven, five of whom were convicted of crossing state lines to incite a riot at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago in 1968.

In the late 1960s, Bond voiced his concern that the police might start napalming blacks in the inner cities, and openly suggested that the poor might legitimately seize property by force in order to achieve their goals.

During the same period, Bond also began discussing the possibility of financial reparations for slavery, suggesting that the churches as well as the federal government should give money to African Americans.

In 1970 Bond compared Adolf Hitler’s relationship to Jews with Richard Nixon’s relationships to blacks.

In 1971 Bond was named President of the Southern Poverty Law Center, on whose Board of Directors he continues to sit. 

Bond was elected to the Georgia Senate in 1974. He would retire from that body in order to run for Congress in 1986, an election he lost to another black politician and civil rights activist, John Lewis. Lewis accused Bond of drug addiction (an allegation the latter sidestepped) and demanded that Bond take a drug test.

In 1980 Bond began hosting America’s Black Forum, the oldest black-owned show in television syndication; he remains a commentator on the program to this day. He also has narrated a number of documentaries (including Eyes on the Prize, PBS’s award-winning production about the civil rights movement), and he has lectured at the Institute for Policy Studies.

In 1998, Bond was selected to chair the NAACP, which had recently been rocked by scandals involving former Executive Director Benjamin Chavis, Jr. and Board member Hazel Dukes.

In Bond's calculus, America is a hopelessly racist nation. “Everywhere we see clear racial fault lines, which divide American society as much now as at any time in our past,” he said in 1999.

In December 2001, Bond praised longtime Communist Party USA leader James E. Jackson, Jr., an individual described by CPUSA Executive Vice Chair Jarvis Tyner as “a consummate teacher of Marxism-Leninism.” 

Throughout his decades as a public figure, Bond has smeared black conservatives with great passion, deriding them for joining what he calls “a right-wing conspiracy” aimed at eliminating affirmative action, abridging voting rights, and reforming public education. In 2001 he claimed that President Bush had "appeased the wretched appetites of the extreme right wing" by appointing "Cabinet officials whose devotion to the Confederacy is nearly canine in its uncritical affection," individuals belonging to the "Taliban wing of American politics." Bond endorsed cartoonist Aaron McGruder's characterization (on America’s Black Forum) of National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice as a murderer, and of the entire Bush White House as an “oil cabal.”

In 2002 Bond told an NAACP convention that black conservatives were participants in “an interlocking network of funders, groups and activists. ... They are the money, the motivation and the movement behind vouchers, the legal assault on affirmative action and other remedies for discrimination, attempts to reapportion us out of office and attacks on equity everywhere.” These conservatives, he said, are “black hustlers and hucksters ... [who], like ventriloquists’ dummies, speak in their puppet master’s voice.” Bond further called anti-affirmative action campaigner Ward Connerly a “fraud” and a “con man.”

In February 2006, at Fayetteville State University in Arkansas, Bond charged that Republicans’ “idea of equal rights is the American flag and the Confederate swastika flying side by side.” When his comments sparked a firestorm of criticism, Bond accused “right-wing blogs” of having mischaracterized his statement: “I didn’t say these things I’m alleged to have said. There is no one in the audience who can say I said them.” But shortly thereafter, the Fayetteville Observer posted a 45-minute recording of Bond’s speech online, proving that he had indeed made the comments. Moreover, in the same speech, Bond had implied that Colin Powell and Condoleezza Rice were token black appointees that the Bush Administration was using as “human shields against any criticism of [its] record on civil rights.”

In January 2010, Bond made the following comments about the late Martin Luther King, Jr.:

"[King told] Charles Fager when they were in jail together in Selma in 1965 that he thought a modified form of socialism would be the best system for the United States. We don't remember the Martin Luther King who talked ceaselessly about taking care of the masses and not just dealing with the people at the top of the ladder. So we've kind of anesthetized him. We've made him into a different kind of person than he actually was in life. And it may be that that's one reason he's so celebrated today because we celebrate a different kind of man than really existed. But he was a bit more radical. Not terribly, terribly radical but a bit more radical than we make him out to be today."

Despite possessing only a B.S. degree from Morehouse College, Bond holds a chair in History and African-American Studies at the University of Virginia and a position as Distinguished Professor at American University. He has also taught at Harvard.