WASHINGTON, (Reuters) – U.S. civil rights leader and former head of the NAACP Julian Bond, who emerged as one of the pre-eminent student activists in America’s turbulent 1960s, died on Saturday aged 75.
Bond died in Fort Walton Beach, Florida, the Southern Poverty Law Center said in a statement, without giving the cause of death. Bond was the civil rights organization’s first president.
“The country has lost one of its most passionate and eloquent voices for the cause of justice,” said Morris Dees, the founder of the Southern Poverty Law Center.
Bond was president of the SPLC from 1971 to 1979. From 1998 to 2010, he was chairman of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.
“Julian Bond was a hero and, I’m privileged to say, a friend. Justice and equality was the mission that spanned his life,” U.S. President Barack Obama said in a statement. “Julian Bond helped change this country for the better.”
By the time Bond burst onto the national stage during the raucous summer of 1968, the then-28-year-old black activist already was on his way to joining the pantheon of American civil rights leaders.
This grandson of a slave arrived in Chicago for the Democratic Party’s presidential nominating convention that year as a leader of a group of political insurgents from Georgia.
During the convention, Americans witnessed searing images of street rioting, police brutality and political anarchy in a country seething over the Vietnam War, racial discrimination and economic disparity.
