The project will celebrate its public launch on Feb. 22, from 4 to 5:30 p.m. in Minor Hall 110, with a panel discussion on Bond’s speeches, moderated by McDowell. Panelists include Kevin Gaines, the inaugural Julian Bond Professor of Civil Rights and Social Justice and associate director of the Woodson Institute; Derrick P. Alridge, Philip J. Gibson Professor of Education in the School of Education and Human Development and director of the Center for Race and Public Education in the South; and Phyllis Leffler, professor emerita of history, who co-directed the “Explorations in Black Leadership” oral history project with Bond at UVA.
The project, and availability of Bond’s speeches online, offer young scholars and activists the benefit of Bond’s vision of civil and human rights, Gaines said recently.
“As struggles to defend basic civil and voting rights, human decency and multiracial democracy remain urgent, Bond’s papers offer a wealth of insight and a beacon of hope to people of all ages and backgrounds working to achieve a more just society and world,” Gaines said.
In an address to the Psychiatric Association Conference in Atlanta in 1978, for example, Bond addressed the concept of “color-blindness.”