Julian Bond - Reflections from the Frontlines of the Civil Rights Movement (2012)

Julian Bond: Reflections from the Frontlines of the Civil Rights Movement is a documentary film by Eduardo Montes-Bradley, a portrait of social activist and former Georgia legislator Julian Bond. In the film Bond approaches the Civil Rights Movement from a personal perspective. “Bond's father was the first African-American president of Pennsylvania's Lincoln University, and the family hosted black luminaries in education and the arts, but Bond recalls growing up in the era of "separate but equal" laws”. Bond also talks about his early involvement with the Civil Rights Movement, his nomination at the age of 28 for vice president of the United States, and the Georgia legislature's efforts to prevent him from being seated as a representative on the grounds that he had not supported the Vietnam War. The film explores the 1963 March on Washington, Martin Luther King Jr., the assassinations of King and John F. Kennedy, and Lyndon B. Johnson's impact on U.S. race relations. Bond also offers his own insights, and adds some personal revelations, such as the fact that he was a published poet during his college years. The film closes with a montage of major African-American figures from Frederick Douglass and Karl Marx, to Abraham Lincoln and Spike Lee. Julian Bond, premiered at the Virginia Film Festival on November 4, 2012.

Synopsis

The film is built around an in-depth interview with Julian Bond, by Eduardo Montes-Bradley at the Sixth & I Synagogue in Washington, D.C., along with the last few lectures that he delivered, as a member of faculty, at the University of Virginia in May 2012. The interviews are bolstered by a barrage of photographs and archival footage taken from different sources. These images help define and illustrate the different historical eras beginning with the American Civil War and running up to the 2008 US presidential election.