Spend an evening steeped in music and contemporary American history when civil rights activist and leader Julian Bond presents “Crossing the Color Line: From Rhythm-n-Blues to Rock-n-Roll,” the first lecture in Gilman School’s annual Race Dialogue Series on Tuesday, November 11, 2014, at 6 p.m. in the Alumni Memorial Auditorium.
The event, sponsored by the Office of Community & Diversity, is open to the Gilman community and the general public. Please reserve your spot here.
In an exciting multi-media presentation, Bond, a lifelong music lover, traces the development of a new kind of music and the diverse Americans – musicians like Sam Cook, Curtis Mayfield, Ray Charles, Jerry Lee Lewis — who made it happen. Bond shares how African Americans influenced and shaped musical history from around World War II to the days of Elvis Presley and beyond.
Through the story of music, Mr. Bond tells the story of the civil rights movement. Using image and song, he traces the melding of jazz, blues, country music and pop into rock-n-roll, stopping along the way to examine the influences of race, demographics, war, immigration and technology in this transformation. In addition, Mr. Bond shares how music popular among Americans emerged from the compositions well-known among African Americans and how the attraction of American teenagers in the 1950s to traditionally African-American styles helped advance the movement and break down barriers among races.
About Julian Bond
From his college days as a founder of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) to his role as former Chairman of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), Julian Bond has been an active participant in the movements for civil rights, economic justice, and peace and an aggressive spokesman for the disinherited.
As an activist who has faced jail for his convictions, as a veteran of more than twenty years of service in the Georgia General Assembly, as a writer, teacher, and lecturer, Bond has been on the cutting edge of social change since he was a college student leading sit-in demonstrations in Atlanta in 1960. He was an activist in the Voter Education Project (VEP) of the 1960s and 1970. First elected to the Georgia House of Representatives in 1965, he ultimately served four terms in the House and six terms in the Senate.
Serving from 1998 until 2010 as Chairman of the Board of the NAACP, the oldest and largest civil rights organization in the United States, Bond worked to educate the public about the history of the civil rights movement and the struggles that African Americans and the poor still endure.
In 2002, he received the prestigious National Freedom Award. He has also been named one of America’s top 200 leaders by Time Magazine. In 2008, he was named a “Living Legend” by the Library of Congress. He is currently a Distinguished Scholar in Residence at the American University in Washington, DC, and a professor at the University of Virginia in the Department of History, where he is co-director of Explorations in Black Leadership.
