Southern Elections Fund & Julian Bond Papers 1965-1975

Access and use

Location of collection:
University of Virginia, Special Collections Dept.
Albert and Shirley Small Special Collections Library
University of Virginia
P.O. Box 400110
160 McCormick Rd
Charlottesville, Virginia 22904-4110
Contact for questions and access:
POC: Brenda Gunn
Phone: (434) 924-1037
Phone: (434) 243-1776
Fax: (434) 924-4968

Summary

Language:
English

Background

Scope and content:

This collection, 1965-1975, consists of correspondence, mailing lists, newsletters and other printed items, photographs, slides, and miscellaneous materials originated by officers, administrators, and sponsors of the Southern Elections Fund, Inc., including professional and political correspondence of Julian Bond, civil rights leader and chairman of the SEF board of trustees. Several prominent contemporary political and civic individuals and organizations, particularly African-Americans, are represented in the collection by correspondence and printed materials.

Biographical / historical:

THE SOUTHERN ELECTIONS FUND

The SEF was established in August 1969 as a non-profit corporation to assist in electing local and state level candidates for office in the eleven states of the old Confederacy (Alabama, Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, Texas, and Virginia). It provided technical assistance, moral support and grants ranging from $100 to $400 to slates or individual candidates, regardless of race, gender, religion, national origin or political affiliation. These grants, awarded by a bipartisan selection committee, provided financial grants-in-aid for election filing fees, campaign and office materials based on merit, campaign needs, and community support. The Fund began with a gift of $30,000 from an anonymous donor after Jack Chatfield, then working with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC) in southern Georgia (and later the SEF's first director), observed much work being done to register black voters "but little or nothing available to help black candidates for minor office." 1

Governed by a board of trustees, the SEF sought private and corporate donations with the goal of building a financial base of support for Southern politics within the African-American community. In 1970 its contributions to the South Carolina campaigns of three blacks and two in Alabama led to their becoming the first blacks elected to those states' legislatures since the end of Reconstruction. Between 1970 and 1975 the SEF contributed campaign funds and technical advice to over 800 candidates, 70 percent of whom were elected to office as part of a grass roots process that changed the nature and color of Southern politics. 2

JULIAN BOND

Julian Bond, the son of Horace and Julia Bond, was born in Nashville, Tennessee, in 1940 and lived in Pennsylvania with his family until he enrolled at Morehouse College in 1957. In 1961 he married Alice Louise Clopton, a student at Spelman (they eventually had five children: Phyllis, Horace, Michael, Jeffrey, and Julia). In the same year Bond, one semester shy of graduation, abandoned his studies to focus on the civil rights movement; because of an increasingly active civic and political career he did not earn his bachelor's degree from Morehouse until 1971. He joined in the growing civil rights movement of the 1960s and participated in public protest against racial discrimination and became a founder and executive secretary of the Committee on Appeal for Human Rights at Atlanta University. Bond also founded and served as the communications director for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee during 1961-1966 and worked on behalf of black voter registration in Alabama, Arkansas, Georgia, and Mississippi. He also was managing editor for the Atlanta Inquirerin 1964.

Elected to the Georgia House of Representatives in 1965, Bond was denied his seat in January 1966 because of his opposition to the Vietnam War; after winning a special election in November 1966 and a Supreme Court ruling that the House's refusal to seat him was unconstitutional, he was seated in 1967 and served until 1974. In 1968, as head of the Georgia Democratic Delagation at the National Democratic Convention, he was nominated for the Democratic presidential ticket but declined because he did not meet age requirements. He became a member of the SEF's board of trustees shortly after its inception in 1969 and later its chairman, 1969-1974.

Bond was elected to the Georgia Senate in 1974 representing the Fifth District and served until defeated for re-election in the 1986 primary. He became president of the Institute for Southern Studies in Durham, North Carolina in 1987; during 1990 he taught civil rights history at the University of Virginia. Divorced from Alice C. Bond in 1989, he married Pamela Sue Horowitz, a Washington, D. C., attorney, in 1990.

Julian Bond has worked in a variety of capacities for numerous organizations: the Delta Ministry Project of the National Council of Churches; the Robert F. Kennedy Memorial Fund; the Martin Luther King, Jr. Center for Social Change, the Center for Community Sharecropper's Fund (president); the Souther Regional Council; the New Democratic Coalition; the Voter Education Project; Southern Poverty Law Center (president); the NAACP; Southern Correspondents Reporting Racial Equality Wars; the Metropolitan Applied Research Center of New York (visiting fellow); and the Institute of Applied Politics (honorary trustee). His articles and political commentary appeared in numerous periodicals, and currently he is a moderator for "Black Forum," a nationally syndicated television program. He is the author of Black Candidates: Southern Campaign Experiences(Atlanta, 1969), and, A Time To Speak, A Time To Act: The Movement in Politics(New York, 1972). The recipient of numerous honorary degrees, Bond has been a distinguished visiting professor (1980-1991) at Drexel University, Harvard, and American University.

1In Series II, subseries B, Box 14, folder "Southern Office Holders Questionnaires" an article entitled "The Northern Role In Southern Political Progress," page 4, states the SEF was organized in the in the fall of 1968. Chatfield quote, Series II, subseries E, Box 14, folder "News Articles," 23 July 1971, Miami Herald, "Funds Aids Blacks as Candidates."

2Series II, subseries B, Box 8, SEF News & Notes, Vol. 1, No. 1, Spring, 1972, page 1; folder "Press Releases," Julian Bond, 29 October 1975.

Acquisition information:
This collection was purchased from Mr. Julian Bond of Washington, D.C., on 9 February 1990.
Arrangement:
Organization

The collection comprises three series:

I. Julian Bond Papers
II. Southern Elections Fund Papers
III. Miscellaneous & Oversize.
Series II contains five subseries:
Subseries A: Leadership/Administrators
Subseries B: Office files
Subseries C: Name files
Subseries D: Fund Raising
Subseries E: Campaigns & Elections.

Arrangement

Folders are arranged chronologically or alphabetically within each series. The original internal order and titles of select folders have been retained. Special items of note, usually letters of distinguished individuals (especially African-Americans) are indicated.

Physical description:
There are 8,000 items (66 feet) in this collection.