A Paradoxical Parable : Julian Bond: High Hopes Turn Sour

It was the final day of the tumultuous 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago, and destiny was calling Julian Bond, a 28-year-old Georgia state legislator and civil rights activist.

His successful challenge to the Georgia delegation headed by segregationist Gov. Lester G. Maddox had marked him as an up-and-comer earlier in the convention. Further interest had followed his stirring speech seconding the nomination of peace candidate Sen. Eugene McCarthy for the presidential race.

Honored by Nomination

Then, in the waning hours of that often bloody and brawling assembly, Bond’s own name was placed into nomination for the vice presidency--making him the only black ever so honored by a major political party. Although he soon was obliged to withdraw because he was seven years shy of the constitutional age requirement for the office, he appeared to have a limitless future. Bright, articulate, witty and boyishly handsome, he seemed the stuff of which the black American political dream was made.

Supporters and admirers--whites as well as blacks--anointed him as a potential successor to Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and Sen. Robert F. Kennedy, both of whom had been assassinated earlier that year. A New York Times Magazine article called him the “leader of the New Politics.” On college campuses, he was frequently introduced as a “future President of these United States.”

But in the nearly two decades since then, the high hopes and aspirations that Bond once engendered have turned increasingly sour. Disappointments have plagued his steps as he sought to move upward: an abortive campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination in 1976, a failed bid for the directorship of the National Assn. for the Advancement of Colored People in 1977, a rejection for the job as head of the American Civil Liberties Union’s Washington office last year.

Most Crushing Blow

The most crushing blow of all also came last year: He lost a bid for Atlanta’s 5th Congressional District seat, an office that had seemed his almost for the asking.

Now 47, and bereft even of his long-held seat in the Georgia Legislature after vacating it for his ill-fated congressional bid, Bond fits even more sharply the description given of him 10 years ago by Washington political columnists Jack Germond and Jules Witcover: “a kind of political bonus baby of great potential who never has quite fulfilled the promise as a national leader that many of his admirers once envisioned.”

Claibourne Darden Jr., an Atlanta pollster and political analyst, said: “Julian Bond was once a golden boy, so to speak, among black politicians. But it has come to the point now of being painfully obvious that he hit his peak early and has been descending ever since.”

What happened to Bond is a paradoxical parable of modern American politics: a political prodigy overcome by his own early brilliance, by shifting political tides and--perhaps most fatally--by a certain passivity of character that kept him from taking control of his destiny.

Bond jumped into politics in the mid-1960s after serving in a behind-the-lines job as public relations chief for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, a group of campus radicals he had helped organize that was in the vanguard of movements to desegregate the South’s Jim Crow facilities and register black voters.

“I wasn’t particularly cut out for politics,” Bond admits, recalling those days. “But we in SNCC had been saying to black people in rural Georgia, Alabama and Mississippi: ‘Hey, you can be the sheriff, you can be the school superintendent, you can be the county commissioner!’ So it seemed a natural thing for me to practice what we were preaching.”

Political Martyrdom

Bond was among eight new black legislators elected in 1965 to the Georgia House of Representatives for a special one-year term; the election was a result of a U.S. Supreme Court reapportionment decision. But he gained instant political martyrdom when he was barred from taking his seat as the new Legislature convened in 1966, ostensibly because of his outspoken opposition to U.S. military involvement in Vietnam.

Newspaper photographs showed Bond sitting forlornly at his House desk while other members of the chamber stood with upraised hands taking the oath of office.

“Although I was one of eight new black legislators, there was particular resentment against me on the part of the white legislators because of my civil rights background,” he says.

That resentment stifled his career in the Georgia Statehouse for years to come. His name on a bill would have spelled its political death, he says. Even speaking in favor of a measure would have proved fatal. “If I had gotten up and said: ‘Motherhood is great, and I’ve got a resolution promoting it,’ they would have said: ‘No way,’ ” Bond says.

Precedent-Setting Ruling

In fact, it was not until March of 1972--more than five years after he had won the right to be seated in a precedent-setting U.S. Supreme Court decision--that he made his first speech in the House. It was on a measure he had written establishing a statewide testing program for sickle-cell anemia, an inherited disease found chiefly among blacks.

Meantime, however, his national political stock continued to rise, largely as a result of his countless appearances on the campus lecture circuit and on national television as a spokesman for black and liberal causes after his vice presidential nomination at the Chicago Democratic convention.

“That nomination changed my entire life,” he says.

In 1970, for example, a nationwide survey of blacks living in urban areas placed Bond first among possible black candidates for President. Bond was the choice of 27.2% of the poll respondents. Next in order were the Rev. Ralph D. Abernathy, Dr. King’s successor at the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, with 23.5%; NAACP chief Roy Wilkins with 17%; Rep. Adam Clayton Powell (D-N.Y.) with 12.4% and Sen. Edward W. Brooke (R-Mass.), the first black U.S. senator since Reconstruction, with 12.3%.

Had All Credentials

But in 1972, when the time looked ripe for a black to capture Atlanta’s 5th Congressional District seat--and Bond had all of the credentials to be a serious contender--he left the field open to others. Andrew Young, a colleague of Bond from the civil rights movement who had made an unsuccessful attempt for the seat two years before, entered the contest and won, becoming the first black congressman from Georgia since Reconstruction. He went on to become the first black U.S. ambassador to the United Nations in 1977, and is now in his second term as mayor of Atlanta.

Bond, meanwhile, moved up only from the Georgia House to the Georgia Senate.

In 1976, however, he was ready to make a play for more political power: this time, the Democratic presidential nomination. His goal was to capture enough delegates in heavily black congressional districts to wrest concessions on urban needs from the eventual nominee. It was a variation on a “black favorite son” scheme that he had formulated for the 1972 Democratic convention but that had never gotten off the ground.

The new plan also failed. Despite his prominence and popularity, he managed to raise only a paltry $11,372 for his campaign, of which nearly $8,000 had been spent before the primary season even officially opened. In an ironic turn, the Rev. Jesse Jackson, another contemporary of Bond from the civil rights era, followed the same basic pattern eight years later and achieved a stunning success.

“When it comes to leading a march or campaigning effectively, Julian Bond doesn’t seem to have that aggressive instinct like Jesse Jackson,” says Loch Johnson, a University of Georgia political scientist. “He’s a kind of intellectual politician in the mold of Gene McCarthy or Adlai Stevenson. There’s a role in politics for the intellectual but, as the examples of McCarthy and Stevenson well illustrate, it’s hard for such people to get elected.”

By the following year--the year in which political columnists Germond and Witcover made their biting assessment of Bond--he was at his political nadir.

‘Cavalier Attitude’

In the Georgia Legislature, he was being roundly criticized for his “cavalier attitude” toward his job. A fellow black legislator, Rep. Billy McKinney, said of him in a 1977 Atlanta Journal-Constitution article: “He’s the most ineffective legislator we have down here. In the 12 years he’s been in the Legislature, he’s passed only one bill: the sickle-cell anemia testing bill.”

Bond himself, in the same article, was quoted as reluctantly admitting: “I’m not as diligent as I should be, I guess. Yes, I guess I’m a little lazy. I wouldn’t want to think that, but . . . one of the things I regret most about my career is that I’ve not had the self-discipline to be a better legislator.”

How far he had fallen also was illustrated that year by his unsuccessful bid to replace the ailing Roy Wilkins as NAACP director--a post Bond still calls “the one job I’ve always wanted.”

Twist of Circumstances

Bond had submitted his resume to the NAACP search committee. But, in a bizarre twist of circumstances, he says he was prevented from being interviewed because of his involvement in the Richard Pryor movie “Greased Lighting.” The film, an action-packed biography of black stock-car racing champion Wendell Scott that was being shot in Madison, Ga., featured Bond in a bit role.

“I had signed a contract that prohibited me from leaving Madison while the film was being shot, except on Sundays,” he says. “But the NAACP search committee wouldn’t accommodate me on a Sunday, and the movie company wouldn’t allow me to accommodate the committee on any other day.”

The post went to Benjamin L. Hooks, a civil rights lawyer and former Federal Communications Commission member who still holds the job.

The next year, Bond auditioned in Los Angeles for a correspondent’s spot on ABC-TV’s “20/20” news show, then still in the proposal stage, but he lost out on that too. He never heard back from the producers.

Making Soundings

In the ensuing years, Bond continued making soundings for a stab at Atlanta’s 5th Congressional District seat. After Andrew Young had vacated it in 1977 for the U.N. ambassadorship, it was held by Wyche Fowler Jr., an urbane white Atlanta attorney and former Atlanta City Council president.

Fowler, however, was a formidable incumbent: He had always supported civil rights and worked diligently for black voters. Bond recognized that, even after he wrote a redistricting plan in the Georgia Senate in 1982 that changed the majority white district to one with a black majority.

Despite the improvement the redistricting plan would have given to his candidacy, Bond backed off from running against Fowler that year with the excuse that he could not raise enough money.

Critics, however, charge that Bond simply lacks the stomach to gamble on anything that doesn’t look like a sure bet. “I call it the ‘Julian Bond syndrome,’ ” says Harry L. Ross, a black Atlanta political consultant who worked for Bond’s successful opponent in last year’s congressional race. “Julian feels like things should be handed to him on a silver platter simply as a result of his being Julian Bond. He doesn’t like to put himself on the firing line.”

It was not until last year--after Fowler decided to vacate the congressional seat and run for the Senate--that Bond finally decided to go for it.

He started out well ahead of the pack. He had the endorsement of virtually the entire black Atlanta political Establishment. Money poured into his campaign coffers from across the country. Polls showed him with a 31 percentage point lead over his nearest competitor, Atlanta City Councilman John Lewis, a former comrade-in-arms from the civil rights movement who has little of Bond’s polish and glamour.

But in a classic come-from-behind struggle, Lewis managed to prevent Bond from winning the Democratic nomination outright by denying him a majority of the votes in the primary--and then he went on to gain a narrow victory over Bond in the runoff, with 35,142 votes to Bond’s 32,447.

All of Bond’s weaknesses seemed to combine to deny him the triumph that had seemed so easily his--his unimpressive record as a state legislator, his intellectual aloofness, his failure to court crucial white votes.

‘A Great Talker’

“I think people saw him as a great talker and speechmaker, very articulate and very smart, but they didn’t see him as a doer or a worker,” says Lewis, who defeated a black Republican candidate in the general election.

Bond’s defeat still leaves a bitter taste in his mouth.

“I don’t think I will ever get over that,” he said. “It’s a terrible feeling to lose something like that. It’s OK if you ask a girl for a date and she says no, or you apply for a job and the guy says no. That’s rejection, but it’s only one person. But when 35,000 people say no. . . .”

For his supporters and admirers, too, it was a crushing blow--one that seemed to say finally to them that their hero would never reach the heights they had hoped for him.

“Julian’s had a string of disappointments in his career,” said Tom Houck, an Atlanta radio talk-show host and close friend of Bond. “But the other things--the run for the presidential nomination in 1976, the NAACP job and the ACLU thing--they were really half-baked efforts. This House race was the first time he made a major commitment to something and failed.”

A Big Question

Where Bond goes from here is a big question. He is not lacking for things to do. He remains in high demand on the lecture circuit, speaking in as many as 10 cities a week at his customary $2,000 a crack. He still regularly hosts a syndicated television talk show, “America’s Black Forum.”

He is the narrator of “Eyes on the Prize,” a six-part documentary of the civil rights movement now airing on national television. And February’s Harper’s magazine features him in a round-table interview on the black American middle class.

Moreover, he says, he would like to resume his syndicated column for the Newspaper Enterprise Assn. and his commentator’s job for an Oakland, Calif., based radio network. He relinquished both of those jobs temporarily to run for Congress.

“I didn’t work from March through Election Day of last year,” he said. “Work for me is the lecturing, the writing, the radio commentary. The salary for state senators was only $7,600 a year.”

Estranged From Wife

More immediately important than his future work, however, may be the future of his marriage. Several persons who know him well fear that Bond and his wife, Alice--whom he married in 1961 and by whom he has had five children, now ranging in age from 24 to 17--are heading for divorce. Bond, they say, has already moved out of his house and into his mother’s, where he has long kept a business office.

Since the election, Bond has turned down at least three job offers.

“One was from a major academic institution in Cambridge, Mass., of some repute, one was running a political organization in Detroit and one was with a corporation in the West,” he said, refusing to elaborate.

But he added: “I’m sure there’s something that could tempt me. But nothing’s come along so far. One of the problems I’m having is I’ve been self-employed all this time and I like it. I decide what I’m going to do and I don’t have to go to an office every day.”

For the time being, politics seems to be out of the picture. Bond squelches rumors that he might run for the Atlanta City Council seat vacated by four-term Councilman James Howard last December after Howard’s conviction for federal income tax fraud. A special election to fill the vacancy is set for March 3.

“I considered running for it, but I just don’t want to be on the Atlanta City Council,” Bond said. “It’s really a step down from this job (of state senator), although it’s easier and pays a hell of a lot more money.”

Rankles at Criticism

Bond rankles at criticism that he has fallen far short of the destiny for which he seemed marked.

“I can’t live up to other people’s ambitions for me,” he said. “I’m really flattered when somebody tells me you should be this or you should be that. But I’ve suffered unfairly because of this. I have to do what I have to do. I can’t live for other people.”

That is cold comfort, however, to those who have believed in his political promise ever since his name was placed into nomination for the vice presidency nearly two decades ago. They fear that Bond, whose 50th birthday is only three years away, may never find his rightful niche in history.

“I think Julian just needs time to cool out and think about what he wants to do when he grows up,” said an aide to Atlanta Mayor Young.