Weekly Badasses

🇺🇸 U.S. Badass: Julian Bond

Julian Bond was elected to the Georgia House of Representatives in 1965 by the voters of his district. The Georgia House of Representatives responded by refusing to let him take his seat. His crime, as far as his fellow legislators were concerned, was publicly agreeing with a statement opposing the Vietnam War and expressing support for young men who refused the draft on grounds of conscience. The Supreme Court eventually had to step in and remind the state of Georgia that elected officials don't lose their seats for expressing political opinions the legislature finds disagreeable.

Bond had already spent years in the fight before that legislative fight happened. Born in 1940 into an academically distinguished Black family — his father was a college president — Bond enrolled at Morehouse College and became one of the founding members of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee in 1960, working directly alongside Ella Baker in the organization's earliest days. He became SNCC's communications director, responsible for getting accurate documentation of civil rights organizing and Southern violence in front of a national press that frequently preferred not to look too closely.

In 1965, at 25 years old, Bond won election to the Georgia House representing a district in Atlanta. Weeks before he was to be sworn in, SNCC released a public statement opposing the Vietnam War and expressing solidarity with draft resisters, arguing that a country still denying Black Americans full civil rights had no moral standing to send them to die for democracy abroad. Bond publicly endorsed the statement when asked about it by a reporter. The Georgia legislature used that endorsement as grounds to refuse to seat him, voting 184 to 12 to bar a democratically elected representative from taking the office the voters had given him.

Bond sued. The case, Bond v. Floyd, reached the Supreme Court in 1966, which ruled unanimously — 9 to 0 — that the Georgia legislature had violated Bond's First Amendment rights by excluding him over political speech. He took his seat. He was re-elected repeatedly over the following years by the same Georgia voters who apparently disagreed with the legislature's assessment of him considerably more than the legislature did.

He went on to serve twenty years in the Georgia legislature, ran for the Democratic vice-presidential nomination in 1968 at 28 years old — technically too young to constitutionally hold the office, which he pointed out himself while declining the nomination — and later served as the first president of the Southern Poverty Law Center and as chairman of the NAACP for over a decade, continuing a career that Georgia had once tried to end before it started because he refused to stay quiet about a war built on the same hypocrisy he'd spent his youth fighting domestically.

They voted 184 to 12 to keep him out of a seat the voters had already given him. The Supreme Court voted 9 to 0 to put him back in it.

"We must recognize the fact that today's racism is not yesterday's racism."

This week's U.S. Badass got elected, got blocked, got unanimously vindicated by the Supreme Court, and spent the next fifty years making sure Georgia never got the chance to try that again.

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🌍 International Badass: Leymah Gbowee

Leymah Gbowee organized thousands of Liberian women, Christian and Muslim together, into a movement that included public sit-ins, mass prayer, and an organized sex strike aimed at pressuring their husbands and partners toward peace — and that movement is directly credited with helping end a fourteen-year civil war and force the exile of a sitting president who had been indicted for war crimes.

Liberia's Second Civil War, from 1999 to 2003, was a continuation of brutal conflict under President Charles Taylor, a war characterized by mass killings, systematic sexual violence used as a weapon, and the widespread use of child soldiers on multiple sides. Gbowee, a social worker who had trained in trauma counseling while working with former child soldiers, had already lived through the trauma of Liberia's earlier civil war and reached a breaking point watching the country descend into the same horror a second time.

In 2002, she organized the Women of Liberia Mass Action for Peace, bringing together Christian and Muslim women across a country where that religious cooperation was itself unusual, in daily sit-in protests at a fish market along the route Charles Taylor's motorcade traveled, dressed in white, demanding an end to the war. The protests grew to include thousands of women and became impossible for Taylor's government to ignore, both due to their scale and their explicit framing as women demanding peace on behalf of their children rather than a conventional political opposition movement that could be easily dismissed or violently suppressed without enormous backlash.

The women also organized a sex strike, encouraged as leverage to push men in their lives — including men on both sides of the conflict — toward supporting peace negotiations. The tactic drew significant international media attention, though Gbowee and other organizers have been clear in later accounts that the broader campaign of sustained public pressure, prayer, and direct confrontation with Taylor's government mattered considerably more to the outcome than the strike alone.

In 2003, when peace talks in Ghana between Taylor's government and rebel factions stalled, Gbowee led a delegation of Liberian women to Accra and staged a sit-in blocking the exits of the negotiating room, physically preventing delegates from leaving until a peace agreement was reached — an act of direct pressure on a room full of armed men that required considerable personal courage given the stakes and the participants involved. The Accra Peace Agreement was signed shortly after. Charles Taylor resigned the presidency and went into exile weeks later, and was eventually tried and convicted by an international tribunal for war crimes and crimes against humanity committed during the related conflict in Sierra Leone.

Gbowee was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2011, shared with Liberian President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf and Yemeni activist Tawakkol Karman, recognizing the specific role organized women's nonviolent action played in ending one of West Africa's bloodiest civil wars.

She organized women across a religious divide the war was actively trying to widen, blocked the exits on a room full of powerful men until they signed, and watched a war criminal go into exile because a movement he couldn't shoot his way past had made continuing impossible.

"If there's one thing this experience has taught me, it's that the woman's international peace movement needs to be reawakened."

This week's international badass organized a religious divide into unity, blocked a room full of warlords until they signed a peace deal, and helped send a war criminal president into exile.

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