In the Fire of Activism: Julian Bond’s Life in Politics and Protest.

In May of 1969, Ebony magazine ran a profile of Julian Bond, the activist and civil rights leader who had recently been reelected to the Georgia House of Representatives. With the United States mere weeks away from putting a man on the moon and the war in Vietnam still raging, the magazine wanted to take stock of where Black America found itself at the end of the decade. It was a moment of both retrospection about the civil rights movement and excitement about what the future held for African American politics. Yet Bond had been fighting for freedom and justice for more than a decade, and it showed. Ebony’s David Llorens wrote, “Attractive cat that he is, Julian Bond looks tired.”

The profile sought to examine what it meant for a radical stalwart, struggling against a broken system from the outside, to become a politician struggling to effect change from within it. Bond’s shift “from protest to politics,” as Bayard Rustin put it in an article earlier in the decade, was a measure of how far the movement had changed Southern society. That Bond was one of the first Black people to serve in the Georgia legislature generations after Reconstruction was also a measure of how much further the nation as a whole had to go.

After describing Bond’s work as a state representative, his speaking tours at colleges, and his deepening involvement in the Democratic Party as its New Deal coalition started to unravel, Llorens moved on to discuss the twin pillars of pride and ambivalence that supported Bond’s new role. These were the same pillars that held up the aspirations and fears of so many African Americans in the immediate aftermath of the civil rights movement. As Llorens wrote, “Julian Bond, as a politician, represents hope for the freedom of black people,” but it was a hope “entirely dependent upon the possibility that white people are capable of a humane and non-racist America.” For Llorens, this hope was real and somewhat tangible. But as he noted at the end of the passage, it depended on a radical change in the thought and action of white Americans—something that in 1969 still appeared far off because of a continuation of the “backlash politics” that had defined American political, social, cultural, and intellectual discourse ever since Reconstruction.

That mix of felt urgency and anxious uncertainty about how much change could be made in American society would define Bond’s efforts for much of his career. His time in office, like his time as an activist, would be characterized by both his hopes for greater social equality and the continuing need to fight for such change when these hopes were too often thwarted. This tension was central to nearly all of his writing, much of which is now collected in a new book, Race Man, edited by the historian Michael G. Long.