Julian Bond’s Time to Teach: A History of the Southern Civil Rights Movement

Horace “Julian” Bond was an influential social justice activist, politician, and visionary who is best known as one of the founders of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC). For over two decades, he taught a popular class at the University of Virginia on the history of the Civil Rights Movement.

Everyone who took a course with SNCC veteran Bond testifies to his depth of knowledge, storytelling, firsthand experience — and his wit. Bond transformed students’ understanding of the Civil Rights Movement and as a result, upended their perspectives on U.S. history and politics today. Thanks to Time to Teach, the rest of us can learn from the classes Bond taught for decades at the University of Virginia and American University.

Historian Jeanne Theoharis was a student of Bond’s and co-edited this collection of his lectures, which he constantly revised based on new scholarship. Theoharis writes that Bond sought to have students “see the movement in its full complexity, to understand what it took — the strategy and the organizing, the many, many people who pushed it forward, and the many, many people who stood in its way — was necessary to understanding our own way forward.” The 22 chapters begin with the founding of the NAACP and carry the reader through the anti-Vietnam War and Black Power Movements. [Description from Rethinking Schools.]

ISBN: 0807033200 | Beacon Press