The University of Virginia has announced that it will establish a permanent position in the College and Graduate School of Arts & Sciences in honor of Julian Bond, the civil rights leader and social activist who died Saturday at age 75. Funding for The Julian Bond Professorship of Civil Rights and Social Justice stands at $2 million, according to the university, and has a goal of $3 million.
Bond joined the university as a professor of history in 1992 and served there until retiring in 2012. His papers are housed at U.Va.’s Albert and Shirley Small Special Collections Library.
Bond’s contributions to higher education extended beyond the University of Virginia. He taught courses on the Civil Rights Movement as a visiting professor at Drexel University and the University of Pennsylvania in 1988 and 1999. He taught in the Department of African-American Studies at Harvard University in 1989 and 1991. He returned to Harvard to teach the National Endowment for the Humanities Seminar from 1996 to 2001. He also served as the Arnold Bernhard Visiting Professor of Political Science, at Williams College, in 1992.
In April 2008, the Library of Congress honored Julian Bond as “A Living Legend.”