Julian Bond Leads Atlanta’s First Sit-In
Julian Bond, civil rights activist and future Georgia state legislator senator, on this day led more than 200 Atlanta area students in the first sit-in protest in Atlanta, challenging segregated public accommodations. They presented “An Appeal for Human Rights” to city officials. Major downtown Atlanta stores agreed to desegregate a year after the sit-in, on March 7, 1961.
Bond was a founding member of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), which was founded in 1960.
In 1965 he was elected to the Georgia House of Representatives. He was initially denied his seat but ordered seated by the U.S. Supreme Court, on December 5, 1966. He took his seat on January 9, 1967 and served until 1974. He later served in the Georgia state Senate from 1975 to 1987.
Julian Bond died on August 15, 2015.
Learn more about Julian Bond at the SNCC Digital Gateway.
Learn more about the Atlanta movement: http://nvdatabase.swarthmore.edu/content/atlanta-students-sit-us-civil-rights-1960-1961
Read “An Appeal for Human Rights”: http://www.crmvet.org/docs/aa4hr.htm
Listen/read an oral history interview with Julian Bond
Learn more about SNCC: Clayborne Carson, In Struggle: SNCC and the Black Awakening of the 1960s (1981)
Read: Julian Bond, A Time to Speak, A Time to Act: The Movement in Politics (1972)
Visit the National Museum of African American History and Culture here