Now, From the State That Brought You Lester Maddox...

It is, most of all, his good looks and his good manners, his prevailing courtesy--his grace--that civilized people find so attractive. He gives the distinct impression of being a gentleman, which he is, and that fact has confused a lot of people. He wears dark, three-button suits and buttondown shirts, and he smiles and says "Sir" to his elders, including Georgia's governor, Lester Maddox, who swears Bond is a Communist and says he can't bear to speak his loathsome name aloud.

Julian Bond is accustomed to such treatment. He ignores it. These days, Bond moves through life like a well-fed tomcat, accommodating himself slowly and easily to his new fame, looking a little sleepy and bored with it all; a light-tan, formidable cat who has earned respect for himself the hard way--in the dirty back alley of American race politics.

"Hey, Ben. How you, boy?" the white, rural Georgia legislator says, in genuinely warm greeting to Ben Brown, a young Atlanta Negro who is a contemporary of Bond's and a fellow member of the Georgia House of Representatives. Bond and Brown are seated side by side at their desks in the House chamber, among its first black members since Reconstruction. The difference between them is that Brown, who believes in the same things Bond does, is well liked and Bond is the most hated black man in the state.

Brown and the white man chat for a few moments. Bond sits, smiling, listening, saying nothing. "How's old Julian doing, anyhow?" the white man says to Brown. "You keeping him out of trouble, ain't you?" Bond and the white man look directly at each other now. Bond still doesn't speak. ("I never speak first to people I don't know. It's part of my nature.") He knows this man voted three times to exclude him from duly elected membership in this legislature and would still be voting to exclude him if the United States Supreme Court hadn't stepped in. And he knows that the fact that this man is approaching him now represents a quiet admission of his new political power.

"Julian, I voted against seating you," the white man says. "But, now, explain it to me. What the hell was it you did, anyway? To tell you the truth, I never did understand it."

What Julian did was, he started out in 1962 as a smart-alecky black boy to embarrass the Georgia legislature by attempting to integrate its spectator galleries. ("Mr. Doorkeeper, get them niggers out of the white section of the gallery.")

What Julian did was, he decided three years later that if they weren't going to let him sit upstairs among the white spectators, he'd get himself a seat downstairs with the white members--and if that's not being uppity, what is? He won it, too, but the legislature refused to seat him, because of his views on the Vietnam war ("This boy has got to come humbly, recant and just plain beg a little"), until the Supreme Court ordered it, even though Bond never did recant or just plain beg a little.

And, finally, what Julian did was, he hauled off and challenged the seating of the Georgia delegation at the 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago, and won again, and ended up acting as floor leader of the Georgia Democratic Party, or what was left of it. ("Julian Bond is knowingly or unwittingly a full-fledged Communist or a Communist dupe," Lester Maddox screamed.)

The effect of all this, especially the national attention Bond received and the favorable impression he created in Chicago, has been the sudden creation of a new national black hero figure.

At the age of 30, Horace Julian Bond is famous. He is considered a spokesman for his race. Wherever a public panel is being formed these days to discuss national problems and the time comes to decide on the black member, his is sure to be one of the names considered. He commands $2000 for a lecture and he receives at least ten offers a day. This fall, he is booked solid, seven days a week. Today, Bond is one of the big, big stars on the campus lecture circuit.

Like most truly authentic national black hero figures, Bond is an original--and, as an original, is widely misunderstood. To white racists, especially those of the traditional Southern variety, he is a traitor and an anarchist, a new wild and woolly radical who is out to set their house on fire. To white liberals, he is--wonder of wonders in this time of riot and black power--a genuine black moderate who doesn't call them honkies, to their faces. And, to the black militants, he is a joke--and not a very funny one, either--because he still operates within existing power structures. Eldridge Cleaver called him a pig, although he qualified that by adding that, of course, Bond wasn't as much of a pig as was Robert Kennedy.

Especially is Bond misunderstood by the group that most looks upon him as a hero: the white radical college students. He gets essentially the same reception and response at every campus he visits these days. The black students, in natural hairdos and colorful African prints, come early and sit in a tight group, in proud, self-imposed segregation. The white kids, in tough gear--old dried and cracked Air Force flight jackets, bleached jeans bell-bottomed with triangles of calico, surplus Navy pea jackets--and with enough hair on their heads and cheeks and chins to clog every drain from Ithaca to Palo Alto, fill the rest of the seats.

And now, before them, there's Julian Bond, short haircut, blue oxford buttondown and, can you believe it, a rep tie, Ivy League suit with, Jesus Christ, a vest and with, sweet, suffering Jesus, a gold watch chain strung across it. Hey, like, really, is that a gold watch chain, Julian? Indeed, it is. It comes as a shock and Bond more often than not is asked, Why do you wear that outfit? "Because I like it," Bond replies evenly. "Why do you wear blue jeans and a beard? That's an outfit, too."

So, in his appearance, he is the epitome of Nephew Tom, and that is a shock; but it is only the first shock of the evening. Bond speaks and then the questions come from the audience. What do you think of the Black Panthers? When will the revolution begin? He is asked the same questions everywhere he goes and he is bored by it all. The trouble is, the audience is trying to turn him into a spokesman and he resists it--because he is an original.

"I don't like that," he says. "I like being a spokesman for myself. People think I stand for things I don't stand for. People are always asking me, 'How do Negroes feel...?' And I don't know how Negroes feel. I think all this diminishes me a great deal."

In plain words, Bond speaks only for himself. "I have no idea what's going to happen next in the black movement," he says. "I'd like to see it move away from the college campuses; not that they don't need reform, but not as much as social institutions do.

"I'd like to see the black movement come back to the South. I think the philosophy of violent confrontation is slowly diminishing. The riots were helpful for our own self-esteem, but the cost was so heavy in human lives.

"The biggest mistake SNCC made was to try to jump from the rural South to the urban North without leaving anything behind. Now they've abandoned the South, where help is still needed the most."

Well, how would he identify himself politically? "I think it depends on where I am physically in the country," he says. "I think down in Georgia, I'm a militant. If I'm in New York, I'm sort of liberal. Really, I think those terms tend to be meaningless."

Bond says all this, takes his money (he makes $5200 a year as a Georgia legislator and depends on the lecture fees for most of his income) and flies tourist class to the next campus. The black students look at one another, shrug and return to their detailed study of the blueprints of the campus air-conditioning system. And the white students? It appears that a lot of them succeed in convincing themselves that the whole thing never happened.

Some years back, there was a study made of the attitudes of college students who spent time working in Africa with the Operation Crossroads program. Too many of them, the study showed, left Berkeley and Madison with an absurdly idealistic concept of what Africa was all about; and when they were confronted with the harsh and basic realities of life there, they refused to accept them. They shut their eyes and, when they got back home, convinced themselves that the whole thing never happened, that the real Africa was a phony illusion and that the Africa of their dreams was still the reality, waiting out there somewhere, shimmering in its goodness and innocent beauty, waiting to be found.

Too many of their kid brothers and sisters do the same thing today with Julian Bond: forget the impression he made the night before. The real Julian Bond is this cool, really cool young light-tan revolutionary who has built up this really impressive political organization down in Georgia, who plots and plots, then strikes. When rejected, reality is so different, so shockingly different.

Here is Bond on the closing day of the 1968 legislature. It's late at night, it's been a long day's drive toward adjournment and a few of the boys are whooping it up out in the corridors, knocking down a little booze, Bond among them. Julian, what the hell was it you did, anyway? When, all of a sudden, here comes Governor Maddox, who hates, fears and condemns Negroes, Communists and alcohol equally. What does Bond do with his Dixie Cup? He quickly dumps it into a trash can, that's what, and smiles innocently as Lester walks by. "I think Governor Maddox would have been irritated, and rightfully so. There should not have been any drinking done in there," he explains later.

Here is Bond, who has the reputation of being the total social rebel, addressing the Atlanta Jaycees; journeying over to Athens to speak to a literary society at the University of Georgia, where, by a vote of 12 to 2, he is made the first black honorary member in history; and, lo, in full color, modeling men's fall fashions in the Atlanta Magazine, a publication of the local chamber of commerce.

Here is Bond, the fervent integrationist, the man who is dedicating his life to the task of demolishing segregated life patterns in the South. He lives in a small brick house right in the middle of black Atlanta, with his wife, Alice, and their five children. Alice is 25 years old, the short, shy and retiring daughter of the chef at Atlanta's Columbia Theological Seminary. Sometimes, when Julian brings in visitors, even old friends, unannounced, Alice does not make an appearance, and there are long, tense, whispered conferences between the two of them back in the bedroom, while the guests sit waiting in the living room, examining the plaques on the wall, nothing the big Magnavox color-television set that blocks the fireplace, considering the fact that the sofa and chairs, fairly new and probably purchased with lecture fees, are covered with clear plastic, and chatting with Michael Julian Bond, four, the number-three child. In contrast to his father's clipped, cultured speech, the child speaks strictly Deep South nigger and is hard to understand.

Bond and his wife buy their clothes in white Atlanta. Now and then, they might go down to the Marriott Hotel dining room in white Atlanta for a meal; he drinks bourbon and ginger ale and more often than not orders filet mignon. And, occasionally, they attend parties on the white side of town, at the home of Charles Morgan, the American Civil Liberties Union lawyer, or perhaps of Jack Nelson, an Atlanta-based reporter for the Los Angeles Times. But Bond is quick to say that almost all his private life is spent with black friends, deep within black Atlanta. "I don't want to live up in New York," he says. "I'd rather live down here. I just like it down here. My family likes it here. My wife likes it here. I just think it's a friendlier, happier place for them."

And, finally, Bond himself is amused by the fact that most members of his college audiences believe that he is a powerful young black political leader who eventually will use the strong political organization he has built to gain state and national power, a cool black cat socking it to the red-necks in the Peach State.

He has no political organization, and no real political power, either. He is quick to say he will never get a statewide bill passed into law, no matter how long he is a member of the legislature. Most of his time is spent processing run-of-the-mill complaints from constituents, complaints about broken street lights and cracked sidewalks and inadequate garbage collection. "Politics is getting ordinary things done," he says. "That's the way you help people. That's what government does."

So there you are. Bond lives in Atlanta like a nigger and doesn't appear to mind it, especially. He not only operates within the established order of things, he really likes it that way best. "All Southern politicians are friendly in an informal situation," he says. "It's their nature. Lester Maddox is a perfect example."

It is not so much that Bond has made things happen as that things have happened--and continue to happen--to him, and that includes the fame-making events at the Chicago convention. If he is a radical, then he is the most conservative, cautious radical in the nation. Today, he stands as one of the best-known Southern blacks. Yet he is not quite Southern. But he's black, just barely.

Julian Bond is not what he appears to be. He is more--and less. Bond does not think of himself as a natural leader; yet, somehow, he always ends up leading, like the quiet former Oxford don who plays a colonel in the British war movies and reads Greek between commando raids. Bond writes poetry. He is neither disillusioned nor alienated; he is naturally remote, removed, a private man. The problem of living as a black man in the United States apparently does not bother him, yet he has involved himself in the civil rights struggle all his adult life. It is a complicated thing.

"The dark miracle of chance"--Thomas Wolfe's description of it--plays an obvious, inestimable role in every life. But intuition tells us that somehow there is an inequality about it. Lucky men, to whom fate seems consistently kind, soon learn that their very best course of action in almost every given situation is to wait patiently for God to come around the corner and do them yet another large favor. Bond is such a man. Chance has been kind to him in his looks, his birth, his upbringing, in practically every step he has taken so far in his passage through life. Over the years, he has learned to trust chance.

As a boy, he was absolutely beautiful: a tall, thin youngster with mocha-colored skin, high cheekbones, lynxlike eyes and an easy grace. Now he has put on weight--a little too much, in fact--and the face (continued on page 204)Julian bond(continued from page 106) and body are heavier. He is heading into his 30s and he is filling out, but the poise and the essential good looks are still there.

• • •

Bond was born in Nashville on January 14, 1940. At the time, his father, Dr. Horace Mann Bond, was president of Fort Valley State College, a small Negro school in a sleepy little town in central Georgia. Julian's father, who received his doctorate in education from the University of Chicago, met his wife when he was a teacher and she a student at Fisk University in Nashville. Mrs. Bond was an Atlanta Negro girl of good economic means; Fort Valley, Georgia, was, of course, a totally segregated town and the hospital facilities available to a pregnant black woman in 1940--college president's wife or not--did not impress her. So Julian was born in Nashville.

Thus, at his birth, a style of life was established that continues today; he was effectively isolated from the humiliations and inconveniences of Southern racial segregation.

His is by no means a unique case. Well-off Southern Negroes have always used their money to build a social stockade around themselves and their children, to isolate them both from the white society that shuns them and from the debased black society that shames them. (In a recent address, Julian's father, now director of educational and social research at Atlanta University, described Southern political leaders who have used their power to keep blacks in economic and social bondage as "brute makers.")

The classic Southern black stockade is the Negro college campus, and that is where Bond spent his childhood, within a quiet society of cultured black men and women and their families. At the age of four, he started attending an experimental nursery school for faculty children at the college, when God only knows what the four-year-old children of Negro fieldworkers a half mile away were doing. And when he was five (that was a very good year), his father became president of Lincoln University in Pennsylvania: the Bonds moved North.

Lincoln was a small town with segregated schools, but there was the same old campus stockade within which to hide. "We lived on campus," Bond says. "We used the gym and the tennis courts. My playmates were the other faculty kids. We all went to the laboratory school on campus that was used for teacher training. It was a very pleasant, very insulated life. To tell you the truth, I never really lived the life of a Southern Negro kid."

He left the stockade temporarily, and for the first time, when he was nine years old. The Lincoln faculty decided the time had come to end segregation in the city's public schools, so all the stockade kids--Julian and his older sister Jane among them--became plaintiffs, and the state supreme court ruled in their favor.

Three years later, at the age of 12, Julian went away to boarding school, and not to your ordinary boarding school, where the lost children of divorced parents spend the winters walking around in shakos and web belts, carrying old plugged Springfields and marching in snow up to their tragic little asses. No, sir. Julian Bond attended one of your really high-class boarding schools, the kind to which people who are still married send their kids--the George School, Quaker, Bucks County. He was the youngest, the smallest and the only black kid there, but he remembers the five years he spent there fondly. He ended up as the goalie on the soccer team, did the backstroke on the swimming team, made good grades and picked himself up a high-toned Eastern accent (and a pacifist outlook) in the process.

By the time Bond was graduated from the George School, his father had gone to Atlanta University, the ultimate of all the Southern Negro stockades. AU is the South's best black school, a confederation of small colleges whose 6000 students are the sons and daughters of the region's intellectual, social and economic elite. It is an almost completely isolated world of its own, rather like a huge bathysphere that permits its inhabitants to exist in relative comfort deep within a cold, alien environment.

By 1960, when Bond was a junior there, studying comparative literature at Morehouse College, swimming on the swimming team and writing poetry for the literary magazine, young Southern blacks were on the verge of revolt, but they didn't know it.

"Except for a few verbal militants, there was no militant mood on campus," Bond says. "We discussed indignities, but never in terms of, let's do something about it. We seldom went downtown, except maybe to buy new school clothes, or to go to the Fox theater and sit in the balcony, because the local moviehouse was so filthy. But on the whole, there were so many attractions on campus, we simply didn't have to face segregation: house parties at big homes with swimming pools, and all the campus culture, all that."

All that came to an abrupt end in February 1960, when a group of black students at North Carolina A & T College in Greensboro staged the first lunch-counter sit-ins.

A few days later, Bond was passing time between classes at the Yates & Milton drugstore adjacent to the AU campus, when he was approached by Lonnie King, a fellow Morehouse student, a big, good-natured Navy veteran whose natural impulse was to organize everything that moved. Bond barely knew him.

King had a news clipping about the Greensboro sit-ins. "Do you think it ought to happen here?" he asked.

"Well, maybe," Bond said.

"I mean, don't you think we ought to make it happen?"

"Well, maybe."

"OK, then. You take one side of the drugstore and I'll take the other. Let's call a meeting in front of Sale Hall for tomorrow morning."

It took them over a month to act. There were endless meetings, there were conferences with university officials. They ran an ad in the Atlanta newspapers, stating their grievances. They started scouting out lawyers and consulting with local NAACP officials. They went downtown and counted the seats in the lunch counters of the city's public-building cafeterias. It was, all in all, the quiet, timid beginning of a movement that ultimately was to produce today's black militantism.

Then they hit. Today, Bond thinks back on it much the same way balding insurance men in Omaha recall that, as lean youngsters of 22, they were airborne officers parachuting with their platoons out of planes over occupied France on D day.

"I was in charge of the group that hit the city-hall cafeteria," he recalls. "Nobody knew what to expect, whether the police would beat us, or shoot us, or what. I told everybody in my group we'd be out of jail in half an hour, and I really believed it. It was the first and only time I've ever been arrested. We stayed in jail for ten hours before bail was arranged. I got out, went back to school and picked up Alice, who was in rehearsal for a production of Finian's Rainbow; she was a dancer. I drove her home, then went home myself and got up the next morning and read about myself in the paper. We all felt very proud of ourselves."

If Lonnie King, or someone else, hadn't suggested action, it is highly unlikely that the thought would have occurred to Bond. Although he had been annoyed and inconvenienced by racial segregation, it had never really touched him. But, given the challenge, Bond did it, he really did it--he recruited, he helped organize and he was a battalion commander in the first attack. Most important, Bond only vaguely knew who King was; but King, the organizer, damn well knew who Bond was. There are people who always get invited to parties and people who don't, people who always are counted in and people who always are left out for some reason, people who just come to mind and people who don't. Julian Bond always gets invited; he is always counted in, always comes to mind.

He was one of those invited to Shaw University in Raleigh, North Carolina, in the spring of 1960, when Dr. Martin Luther King's Southern Christian Leadership Conference called together student-activist leaders from Negro colleges all over the South, a meeting that gave birth to the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. By the time James Forman, SNCC's first executive director, had things organized and had directed SNCC's energies toward rural voter registration, Bond was a senior in college. But he wasn't especially interested in his studies anymore.

He was working as managing editor of The Atlanta Inquirer, a new, liberal weekly; and in his spare time, he did publicity for SNCC. "After a while, I wasn't going to school anymore, so I just withdrew and asked Jim Forman to put me on the staff."

Those were the days when people like Bond still thought there was a chance to change things in the South through the use of existing institutions, when the likes of Stokely Carmichael and Rap Brown were working in the black belt, helping rural blacks register for the first time. It was another age, an age of innocence. The Supreme Court had ruled in favor of reapportionment, Congress had passed the Voting Rights Act and the new Civil Rights Act, and suddenly it seemed there were all these fine new tools that could be used to pry open the segregated South. All that was needed was dedication, persistence, organization and courage. Wasn't it?

History will show that it was one of the last true expressions of faith in the nation's existing institutions by politically involved young people.

And, of course, they got creamed. They registered droves of awed and frightened rural Southern Negroes, and the effect of that is only now beginning to be felt in the South. But in the process, they were pushed around, they were beaten, they were murdered and their bloody bodies were buried secretly in muddy Mississippi dams. They were taught a harsh lesson; they were seeking power and they learned the hard way that nobody gives that up without a fight, moral and legal rights be damned. And, eventually, they were disillusioned, embittered and radicalized. It was that tough time that brought forth Carmichael and Brown, their eyes shining with hatred, poor babies, their disillusionment total and final. They had been ravaged; they didn't like it one bit, so they came out of the rural South screaming hatred and sounding the call to arms.

But not Julian Bond. At the time the others concluded that the only way to do it was to burn the nation and start over, Bond--well--Bond decided to run for a seat in the Georgia legislature. "I thought, hell, why not? It would bring SNCC into town. And, besides, it would really be an experience." Most of his old friends in SNCC thought differently. To them, there was not a lot of difference between running for the Georgia legislature and running for Grand Kleagle in the Belzoni, Mississippi, chapter of the Ku Klux Klan.

But Bond ran. He conducted a door-to-door campaign through Atlanta's District 136, a newly reapportioned Negro area, chauffeured supporters to the polls in his own car on Election Day and, in November 1965, at the age of 25, became the youngest member of the Georgia legislature.

Like all Southern legislatures, Georgia's is irresponsible. Its members pander to the basest instincts of their constituents, secure in the knowledge that whatever legislative monstrosities they create eventually will be subjected to corrective surgery by the good old reliable U. S. Supreme Court. So they feel free to play games, to mess around a little just for the hell of it.

Bond was not well known in Georgia and his election was the source of no special controversy. He would have been sworn into office without incident, except that a week before the legislature convened in January 1966, Sammy Younge, a well-liked young SNCC worker, was shot in the back and killed by an old white creep when he tried to walk into a white toilet at a Tuskegee, Alabama, gas station.

SNCC had until then taken no official position on the Vietnam war, although a statement condemning U. S. involvement had been in the works a long time. Younge's murder triggered its release; and when reporters asked Bond his opinion of it, he said he fully endorsed it.

All hell broke loose. In a state where defiance of Federal policy long has been not only legitimate but admirable and politically profitable, Bond's position suddenly became the subject of intense controversy. On opening day, the legislature swore in the other new black members but voted to exclude Bond, and, in the process, made him famous. He appeared on Meet the Press. Vice-President Hubert Humphrey came out on his side. In Washington, a group of U. S. Congressmen criticized the Georgia House for "a dangerous attack on representative government." In New York, a group of African UN delegates gave a luncheon in Bond's honor. And in Atlanta, Martin Luther King moved in.

King led a march on the capitol, demanding that Bond be seated immediately. Fifteen hundred demonstrators chanted, "You can do it, Julian Bond," Julian's father, a most dignified figure, among them; and Ralph Abernathy knelt on the capitol steps and asked the Lord to rough up the legislators a little bit. "May their nights be restless and their beds be hard, hard, hard," he pleaded.

God didn't intercede, but the Federal courts did; it took Bond a full year to gain his seat. Two special elections were held and he won them both. When a lower Federal court ruled against him, Bond appealed to the Supreme Court; and in December 1966, in a 20-page, unanimous decision delivered by Chief Justice Warren, the High Court said Bond's freedom of speech had been denied and ordered that he be seated. He drew $2000 in back pay and, as usual, managed to keep his cool and his dignity through it all. "I'm happy and proud. I just hope I'll be treated like any other legislator," he said. He was sworn in in January 1967, with his mother looking on.

Bond was pretty much out of the spotlight for the next year and a half, until the 1968 Presidential campaign. The only strong conviction he had about that, it seems, was that he was adamantly opposed to Lyndon Johnson. First he endorsed Dick Gregory. Then he agreed to go to New York and campaign for Robert Kennedy. And, after Kennedy was killed, he threw his lot in with Eugene McCarthy.

The McCarthy organization, such as it was, had taken a good look at the Georgia delegation, had realized it was hopelessly committed to Humphrey and had resolved to back a challenge by insurgents. Bond was not a leader of the insurgent group, but ended up being named cochairman of it, because--well--he always gets invited, is always counted in, always comes to mind. They went to Chicago demanding moon, stars and sun, demanding that a carefully integrated delegation of regulars be thrown out and that they be seated instead--but really expecting little more than a polite how-de-do from the credentials committee. Bond was as surprised--no, shocked--as everybody else when they were awarded half the state's delegate votes; and he was equally surprised to find himself suddenly thrust into a position of leadership.

The McCarthy forces decided to use the credentials committee's half-and-half recommendation as a test of strength. They moved that the whole regular delegation be unseated and replaced by the Bond group. The motion was defeated, but, in the process, suddenly a national television audience heard thousands of people chanting, "Julian Bond, Julian Bond," and saw a handsome colored boy being nice and polite during the whole thing.

Suddenly, there was Bond at the speaker's platform, seconding the nomination of McCarthy. Suddenly, there was Bond himself being nominated for Vice-President. "We realized he didn't have a chance," said Ted Warshafsky, the delegate from Wisconsin who did the nominating. "But that wasn't the point. Bond stands for all the things the Kennedys stood for. It may be only symbolic now, but it may not be four years from now. He represents the wave of the future."

And suddenly, Julian Bond was famous.

He enjoys the fame. He enjoys the recognition and the money that it brings. He enjoys casually telling friends that, no, he will not be available for such-and-such an occasion on such-and-such a date, because that day he will be posing for an oil painting being used to illustrate yet another national-magazine article about him.

He is not a vain man, but a lot of flashbulbs have popped in his face and enough sound-on-film television crews have scurried before him so that he is perfectly aware of his celebrity. He is quiet and self-contained on all public occasions. That is his style; it serves him well, and he knows it.

Besides, it is his natural style, growing out of his natural grace, a product of his upbringing, a new style, a product of the times. Before Bond, Southern Negro leaders had about them a smack of the black Billy Graham--King James Version spellbinders they were. ("Talk, talk, that man can talk! members of Martin Luther King's audiences at Ebenezer Baptist Church used to stand and shout during his social sermons.) They could take their audiences and make them sway and bend like field straw before a summer rain wind, make them hum and um and amen in agreement, make them stand and shout, kneel and pray--and march on city hall, when the time came.

But Bond is not that way; he is not a preacher. He does not exhort, not ever. Bond is cool and casual. He treats white Southern politicians the way handsome men treat girls they are after--with charm and understatement, and with the waiting game. To this extent, as far as style and its impact is concerned, Julian Bond is a black John F. Kennedy.

He has only a misty idea as to where the future will lead him. He vaguely desires to put together some sort of new regional, three-state political force in Georgia, Alabama and Mississippi, using as its fuel core the mass of newly registered black voters. But he really has no idea of how to go about organizing it or what to do with it once it is put together.

His fondest, most immediate dream is to be a United States Congressman. Unless somebody has blown the prediction pretty badly, the 1970 census will dictate that Atlanta must have two Congressmen, not one, and one of those will come from the black side of town. That is the job Bond has his eye on.

Meanwhile, he will go along pretty much as he has always gone along, taking things as they come. He drives an unprepossessing car and, because he receives occasional telephone death threats, sleeps with an old double-barreled shotgun beside his bed. It is hard to get his phone number and, anyhow, Alice won't answer it during the day, when he's not there.

Outside his own Atlanta district, he commands no political power in Georgia. But Georgia Democrats know that it is impossible for them to move their party into national affairs without taking him into account. So they circle each other warily, friendly and smiling, full of Southern political exaggeration. And Julian misters them all, but somehow ends up giving the nagging impression that he thinks he is not only every bit as good as they are but just a little superior.

Bond says that he identifies with Rap Brown more than with any other person he knows, because "he is the one really honest person, utterly without fear." But the two of them have taken different trails, and Bond's has kept him inside the forest. Some of his friends believe that he will get lost in there and never find his way out, that the forest will absorb him. But the truth is that he doesn't want to find his way out, because, he says, he is more effective working on the inside, integrated--after a fashion.