Preloading

Remembering Horace Julian Bond

CC | tv-14
Editor's note: We were deeply saddened to learn of Horace Julian Bond's passing. Our thoughts are with his family. In memory of the civil rights leader, OWN will air an encore presentation of Oprah Winfrey Presents: Legends Who Paved the Way on Saturday, August 22, at 1 p.m. ET/PT.

Horace Julian Bond was destined to be a scholar and an activist. Bond grew up on the campus of Lincoln University in Pennsylvania. His father was a prominent professor and the school's first African American president, and his mother was a college librarian. In 1957, Bond's family left the North and moved to the Deep South, where his father took a position as a dean at Atlanta University. "I would go from the relative safety of where I was living to the relative terror of where I was about to move, to Georgia," Bond once said.

As a student at Morehouse College, Bond took the one and only class ever taught by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and began organizing lunch room sit-ins across Atlanta. "You didn't know whether someone at the lunch counter would hit you or throw coffee on you," he said. "You have to be careful, but you can't allow yourself to become paralyzed with fear."

After the voting rights marches from Selma to Montgomery, Bond, a founding member of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), became the first African American to be nominated for vice president of the United States.