Since I heard on Sunday that Julian Bond had passed away, I’ve been reading reflections on his life. Bond was one of the legends of the civil rights movement: an early leader of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, a co-founder of the Southern Poverty Law Center, a longtime state lawmaker who had to take his fight to be seated in the Georgia House of Representatives all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court. In his later years, he led the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and was a strong voice for LGBT equality and against efforts to undo the Voting Rights Act.

I learned a lot about Bond from his obituaries; for instance, I did not know that he and John Lewis, both civil rights veterans from the 1960s, fought a bitter Congressional campaign against each other in 1986. Some personal reminiscences have been enlightening too. For entertainment value, you can’t beat Howie Klein’s story about the time he invited Bond and Strom Thurmond to speak on the same day of 1966 at the State University of New York in Stony Brook.

Stephen Carter wrote a wonderful column on “The beauty of Julian Bond’s voice.” Carter had known Bond since the 1970s, when his mother was one of Bond’s legislative staffers. Before I read Carter’s piece, I had no idea that a legendary Iowa Democrat and Bond were political allies.

I’m not old enough to remember the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago, best known for the violent police and military suppression of anti-war demonstrations. An opponent of the U.S. involvement in Vietnam, Bond was among those in the convention hall who criticized the crackdown on protesters. He was also “a co-chairman of a racially integrated challenge delegation from Georgia,” and one of his white colleagues nominated him for vice president. He was too young for the job, but the episode raised Bond’s profile on the national scene.

The Cedar Rapids Gazette’s article on Bond’s death shed light on another part of that story, which I had never heard:

Before he could be nominated [for vice president], though, Bond first had to gain full access to the convention. And for that he credited Iowa Gov. Harold Hughes.

Hughes noticed that Bond was sitting in the gallery when he was supposed to be seated on the floor during the 1968 gathering.

Hughes reached out to a contact who could help and got Bond admitted to the floor. The pair remained friends afterward.

During the 1968 Democratic convention, Hughes nominated Eugene McCarthy for president, and Bond seconded the anti-war candidate’s nomination.

Carter recounted how a few years later, Bond seized an opportunity to help Hughes, by that time a U.S. senator from Iowa.

In 1971, Bond made enemies when he supported Sen. Harold Hughes, who was white, over Patricia Roberts Harris, who was black, for credentials chair at the Democratic National Convention. Bond’s explanation? Harris, he said, “did not deserve the support of black people” because she was backed by “the forces determined to keep black people from participating” in the party’s raucous and divided 1968 convention.

(Harris landed that credentials chair post, and her committee made some controversial decisions during the 1972 Democratic convention.)

According to the Gazette, Bond first visited Iowa in 1967 to speak to civil rights and anti-war activists in Des Moines. Beginning in 1969, he “was a frequent speaker at Iowa colleges and universities,” and during his tenure as NAACP leader, Bond spoke at the African American Museum of Iowa in Cedar Rapids.

If anyone in the Bleeding Heartland community had a chance to meet Bond or attend one of his public talks, please share your memories in this thread.

UPDATE: At Blog for Iowa, Paul Deaton recalls hearing Bond speak at the University of Iowa in 1970.