A remembrance gathering will be held in Oak Bluffs this weekend for Julian Bond, the well-known civil rights leader and former chairman of the NAACP who died August 15 at the age of 75. The gathering will be at Inkwell Beach at 3 p.m. Saturday.
Mr. Bond, whose death was announced last weekend by the Southern Poverty Law Center, had visited the Island on more than one occasion through the years to visit friends and also speak at public forums, from the Martha’s Vineyard Hebrew Center to the summer lecture halls of Oak Bluffs.
A charismatic speaker, in August 2009 he urged a weekend leadership retreat at the United Methodist Church in Oak Bluffs to agitate and organize.
“The best advice I ever heard was what Frederick Douglass said shortly before he died,” Mr. Bond told the gathering. “He said ‘agitate, agitate, agitate,’ . . . . If you agitate, and agitate wisely and correctly against the evils that you see about you everywhere you go, and you get others to join you in this agitation, then you will help to . . . open doors, to make this a better world.”
Ten months earlier President Obama had been elected to his first term, and Mr. Bond, who was chairman of the NAACP at the time, was questioned about the backlash taking place across the country.
“There are a large number of Americans uneasy with the shifting demographics of the country,” he said. “The fact that we have elected a black President who also happens to be well-spoken, well-educated, and highly intelligent is unsettling to his opposition, and they react in ways that damage the country as a whole.”
Mr. Bond had been an activist from a young age, co-founding of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee in the 1960s when he was student at Morehouse College in Atlanta. He also served in the Georgia state legislature for 20 years and founded the Southern Poverty Law Center, serving as its president from 1971 to 1979, then chairing the NAACP decades later. He also was a writer, poet and university professor.
President Obama issued a statement last Sunday morning from his vacation home in Chilmark.
“Julian Bond was a hero and, I’m privileged to say, a friend. Justice and equality was the mission that spanned his life -- from his leadership of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, to his founding role with the Southern Poverty Law Center, to his pioneering service in the Georgia legislature and his steady hand at the helm of the NAACP . . . . Julian Bond helped change this country for the better. And what better way to be remembered than that.”
In a remembrance published in The New Yorker, journalist Charlayne Hunter-Gault who lives in Oak Bluffs and knew him for more than 50 years called him a “patient mentor,” and said his commitment to racial equality and human rights never flagged.
Dr. Louis W. Sullivan, president emeritus of the Morehouse School of Medicine and former U.S. Secretary of Health and Human Services, also issued a statement. “We mourn the loss of a great civil rights leader, but we celebrate his many contributions toward a better America,” he said. Dr. Sullivan hosts his annual walk/run benefit for the Martha’s Vineyard Hospital this weekend.
Speaking on the Vineyard in 2009, Mr. Bond reflected on his path to leadership.
“I think you get to be where you are by your parents,” he said. “[My father] was always interested in higher education and always interested in progress of the race, and instilled in his children the ideals which he held. My mother, his life-mate, was the same kind of person. I knew from my earliest days that there were no differences between people [of different races]. People were just people.”
Comments (1)
Comments
Comment policy »