Julian Bond was a monumental civil rights figure

At a time when keeping one's cool was perhaps more important to civil rights than at any stage of the movement before and perhaps any since, Julian Bond seldom if ever lost his.

The longtime civil rights leader and 20-year veteran of the Georgia General Assembly died at 75 Saturday night in Florida, after a short illness that his wife said was the result of vascular disease. As news of his passing spread, tributes came in from friends, colleagues, admirers and even a few former adversaries. President Obama called him a "hero and, I'm privileged to say, a friend" whose quest for justice and equality "spanned his life."

Bond's involvement with civil rights came early when, along with such historic figures as John Lewis and Stokely Carmichael, he would be instrumental in founding the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee. (Both Bond and Lewis parted ways with the committee when, as the New York Times reported, "its leadership was taken over by black power advocates who forced whites out of the organization.")

In 1971 he co-founded, with Alabamian Morris Dees, the Southern Poverty Law Center in Montgomery, an organization he would lead as president until 1979 and on whose board he would serve for the rest of his life. Dees paid tribute to his old friend by saying he" advocated not just for African-Americans but for every group, indeed every person subject to oppression and discrimination, because he recognized the common humanity in us all."

One of the most seminal episodes in Bond's life and public career was his election to the Georgia General Assembly in 1965. He was refused his seat on the ostensible (and constitutionally laughable) grounds of disloyalty because of his opposition to the Vietnam War. The U.S. Supreme Court, in what was a no-brainer decision even in the turbulence of the mid-Sixties, ruled unanimously in 1966 that the legislature had denied Bond a seat simply for exercising his First Amendment rights.

A bitter and unsuccessful congressional race against former ally Lewis (with whom he later reconciled), a campaign shadowed by allegations of cocaine use, ended Bond's political career. But he was elected board chairman of the national NAACP in 1998 and served in that position for 10 years, and he was in near-constant demand as a lecturer and educator for the rest of his life. He taught at, among other schools, Harvard, Penn, the University of Virginia, American University, Williams College and Drexel University.

Charlayne Hunter-Gault, one of the first two black students at the University of Georgia and a friend of Bond's since the 1960s, said a new generation of social activists could learn from his example: "Everybody is not going to be out there in the street with their hands up or shouting There've got to be people like Julian who participate and observe and combine those two things for action and change that make a difference."

This story was originally published August 17, 2015 at 3:51 PM with the headline "Julian Bond was a monumental civil rights figure."