Julian Bond changes mind, decides to seek new term as NAACP board chairman

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Wednesday, December 10, 2008

BALTIMORE (AP) Three weeks after announcing he would not seek another term as chairman of the NAACPs national board, veteran civil rights activist Julian Bond said Tuesday that he has changed his mind. Bond told The Associated Press Tuesday night he was flattered and pressured in a positive way by his board members to stay on. He first said he was interested in returning during an interview on The Tom Joyner Morning Show.


Bond also said that even with the election of Barack Obama as president, the civil rights group has much work to in this country.

"We're not the national association for the advancement of one person," Bond said. "Obama has reached the mountaintop; we want to help others reach the mountaintop. That's the unfinished work."

Bond, 68, has been board chairman since 1998.

Bond helped found the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee while a student at Morehouse College in Atlanta in 1960 and participated in protests and registration campaigns throughout the South.

In 1965, he was elected to the Georgia House of Representatives, which refused to seat him until the Supreme Court intervened the following year. He served for 20 years in the Georgia legislature before an unsuccessful bid for Congress in 1986.

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