By Lady Houston
FROM WIKIPEDIA COMMONS
Horace Julian Bond (January 14, 1940 – August 15, 2015) was an American social activist, leader of the civil rights movement, politician, professor, and writer. While he was a student at Morehouse College in Atlanta, Georgia, during the early 1960s, he helped establish the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). In 1971, he co-founded the Southern Poverty Law Center in Montgomery, Alabama, and served as its first president for nearly a decade.
Bond was elected to serve four terms in the Georgia House of Representatives and later he was elected to serve six terms in the Georgia State Senate, serving a total of twenty years in both legislative chambers. Following his career in the legislature, he was a professor of history at the University of Virginia from 1990 to 2012. From 1998 to 2010, he was chairman of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP).
PERSONAL LIFE AND DEATH
On July 28, 1961, Bond married Alice Clopton, a student at Spelman College. They had five children: Phyllis Jane Bond-McMillan, Horace Mann Bond II, Michael Julian Bond (an Atlanta City councilman), Jeffrey Alvin Bond, and Julia Louise Bond. They divorced on November 10, 1989.
In 1990 Bond married Pamela Sue Horowitz, a former SPLC staff attorney. Bond died from complications of vascular disease on August 15, 2015, in Fort Walton Beach, Florida, at the age of 75.
AWARDS AND HONORS
- 2002, he received the National Freedom Award, from the National Civil Rights Museum.
- 2006, he was awarded the National Leadership Award, from the National LGBTQ Task Force
- 2009, he was awarded the Spingarn Medal, from the NAACP.
Among 25 honorary degrees, he was awarded:
- 1999, an honorary LL.D. from Bates College.
- 2008, an honorary degree from George Washington University. Bond was also the 2008 Commencement Keynote Speaker.
- 2009, an honorary L.H.D. from Macalester College.
- 2015, an honorary L.H.D. from Skidmore College.
