Horace Julian Bond was born on January 14, 1940, in Nashville. Both parents were academics: his father an administrator at historically black colleges and his mother a librarian. The family moved to Pennsylvania when he was five after his father was appointed the first African-American president of Lincoln University (PA). Bond was expected to follow in his footsteps as an educator but the young man was more attracted by journalism and political activism.
Aged 12, Bond was sent to George School near Philadelphia, a private Quaker-run establishment. There he first encountered racial resentment when he began dating a white girl, incurring the disapproval of white students and the school authorities.Another five years later, his father was appointed as Dean of Education at Atlanta University and the family moved south again. Bond was enrolled at the prestigious Morehouse College where he attended a class taught by Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. However, extracurricular activities drew his attention more than academic studies.In 1960 he co-founded the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), a student activist group that gave young black Americans a revolutionary loudspeaker during the civil rights movement and executed some of the movement’s most dangerous work in the Deep South. Dozens of his friends went to jail during his time with SNCC but he was arrested only once when he led a sit-in at the City Hall cafeteria in Atlanta, part of a wave of protests across the South against segregated public facilities.
In 1961, Bond dropped out of college to focus exclusively on civil rights efforts. He served as the SNCC’s communications director for five years and deftly guided the national news media toward stories of violence and discrimination. He organized campaigns to register black voters, and led student protests against segregation and Jim Crow throughout Georgia, Alabama, Mississippi, and Arkansas.On the strength of his personality and quick intellect, he moved to the center of the civil rights action in Atlanta, the unofficial capital of the movement, at the height of the struggle for racial equality in the early 1960s.
During this period, Bond and some fellow black students visited the Georgia House of Representatives. Having deliberately sat in the whites-only visitors’ section, they were escorted out by Capitol police, but he was destined to return to the House.