CHAMPAIGN, Ill. – Julian Bond, the chairman of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, will speak on “The Broken Promise of Brown” beginning at 7:30 p.m. Friday (April 2) in the auditorium of Smith Memorial Hall, 805 S. Mathews Ave., Urbana.
Bond’s address is the keynote for a three-day conference, “Promises to Keep? Brown v. Board and Equal Educational Opportunity,” at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. The conference is being held in recognition of the 50th anniversary of the Brown v. Board of Education U.S. Supreme Court decision, coming May 17, which ended legal segregation in public schools.
Bond’s address is free and open to the public.
Along with his role as chairman of the NAACP, Bond is a professor of history at the University of Virginia and a Distinguished Adjunct Professor in Residence at American University in Washington, D.C.
His civil rights efforts began in 1960, during his years as a student at Morehouse College in Atlanta, where he was a founder of a student civil rights organization that would win integration of the city’s theaters, lunch counters and parks. He also was one of several hundred students that year who founded the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, which would become a driving force in the growing civil rights movement. He soon became SNCC’s communications director and editor of its newsletter, The Student Voice, and worked in voter registration drives in several states.
In 1965, Bond was elected to the Georgia House of Representatives, and would serve more than two decades as a state representative and then senator.
In 1971, he became the first president of the Southern Poverty Law Center, and continues as president emeritus. The center is known for its tolerance education programs and work in opposing white supremacist and hate groups.
Among his other accomplishments, Bond has been a host or commentator on several television and radio shows, including “America’s Black Forum” and “Today,” was the author of a nationally syndicated column called “Viewpoint,” and narrated the critically acclaimed PBS series “Eyes on the Prize,” on the history of the civil rights movement. He also was a one-time host of the television show “Saturday Night Live.”
Bond is the author of “A Time to Speak, A Time to Act,” a collection of essays; and of “Black Candidates – Southern Campaign Experiences.” His poems and articles have appeared in a variety of publications, among them The Nation, Negro Digest and The New York Times.
The conference is co-sponsored by the colleges of Education and Law, and is part of the yearlong Brown v. Board of Education Jubilee Commemoration at the university.
