🇺🇸 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.