After his election, Bond found himself at a curious intersection of local, national, and international politics when the state House refused to seat him because he had endorsed SNCC’s anti-war stance. SNCC, Martin Luther King Jr., and other activists rallied to defend Bond’s right to represent his constituency in Atlanta. Eventually the Supreme Court ruled, 9–0, in Bond v. Floyd that his right to free speech had been violated by the state House’s vote to deny him a seat.
After Bond became a legislator, he found that more of his peers were following in his footsteps. People like John Lewis, Marion Barry, and Jim Clyburn, after years in the streets demanding change, were now running for office as they sought to secure and extend the gains they had helped win. It seemed the logical next step, even if the change that could be achieved in state legislatures sometimes appeared small compared with what could be done at the federal level. And yet, as Llorens wrote in Ebony, that kind of work mattered as well: Basic services like streetlights, garbage removal, sewage, repairing roads, and draining water from flooded basements were “‘some of the things we need’ as Julian sees it, and he takes pride in being able to use his political weight to deliver them. ‘Those are things my constituents weren’t always able to get in the past,’ he says. Nor are most of his constituents, who…are victims of poverty, apt to forget the water removed or the street repaired.”
The essays in Race Man nicely illustrate this trajectory from college activist to elected official (and beyond). Broken into 10 sections, the book traces Bond’s political formation throughout these periods of his life. The problems of white supremacy, capitalism, imperialism, and misogyny were his fights throughout, even if they all changed shape. From the struggle against Jim Crow to the battle for LGBTQ rights, he remained convinced that it was necessary to agitate on behalf of the powerless outside the halls of power, but as he got older, he became convinced one had to do it from inside them as well. Whether as an activist struggling for voting rights or as a politician in the Georgia legislature redrawing district boundaries, Bond insisted that only through a combination of movements and policy could social change be achieved.
Bond’s essays capture the intellectual world that inspired him and that he helped inspire in turn. Though dedicated to egalitarian politics, he often found himself in heated debate with other elements of the left. This was especially true in the late ’60s, as the hope of nonviolent civil disobedience peacefully changing American society began to buckle under the strain of Vietnam, the half-hearted War on Poverty, and the ever-present specter of white backlash. The rise of the Black power movement offered Bond and other civil rights activists a unique challenge: They embraced many key components of this more radical turn but also struggled to find their way among its constituency, one that increasingly seemed to view the gains they had won as limited and incomplete.