Remembering Julian Bond through his own words

Julian Bond, who blazed a trail for civil rights that began with an Atlanta sit-in in 1960, passed away last week at the age of 75.

Bond became a Georgia lawmaker, founded the Southern Poverty Law Center and led the NAACP.

Relatives of Bond are inviting people who wish to honor him to spread flower petals in water at 2 p.m. on Saturday.

That's when Bond's relatives plan to honor his wishes by spreading his ashes in the Gulf of Mexico in a private ceremony.

Bond made many stops in Minnesota. Here are excerpts from three of his most recent speeches in the state. Click on the audio to listen to the speeches in their entirety.

Bond at Westminster Town Hall Forum in Minneapolis, March 10, 2005

The speech marked the 50th anniversary of the Montgomery bus boycott and the 40th anniversary of the Voting Rights Act.

"So this year, as we commemorate these anniversaries, should be a time to examine our present in relation to our past. One thing we know is that the body politic continues to feed off race. It was Lyndon Johnson, not Karl Rove, who predicted the outcome of last fall's [2004] election. When he signed the Civil Rights Act of 1964, President Johnson told his young aide Bill Moyers, 'I think we delivered the south to the Republican Party for your lifetime and mine.' That year, despite his national landslide, Johnson lost five southern states, including four that Democrats had not lost in 84 years. Now the Republicanization of the former slave states is complete."

"The 1964 Civil Rights Act was the most sweeping civil rights legislation before or since, and our democracy's finest hour. Now of course, Martin Luther King was the most famous, the best known, of all of the modern movement's personalities. But we ought remember this was a 'people's movement.' It produced leaders of its own. It relied not on the noted, but on the nameless. Not on the famous, but on the faceless. It didn't wait for commands from afar to begin a campaign against injustice. It saw wrong and acted against it. It saw evil and brought it down."

Bond, at St. John's University and the College of St. Benedict, in Collegeville, October 29, 2008

This speech was given a few days before the election of President Barack Obama.

Julian Bond said the 1960's were the battlegrounds for social change. "All the movements of the decade: anti-war, civil rights, women's rights, and environmental, would lead to a questioning of authority and a repudiation of the status quo that I believe is the era's greatest legacy." Bond described the decades of achievement and back-sliding in integration, equality and racial justice as "the complex rhythm of our nation's racial dance."

Bond said "we must say yes to justice, yes to equality, yes to peace. We need to redeem the promise of our government." And that he was optimistic about the future because "each new generation is more tolerant."

Bond at Metro State University in St. Paul, January 12, 2006

He spoke at an event marking the Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. holiday.

"Our annual remembrance of King necessarily leads us to examine the state of race in America. America, if you scramble the letters, spells, 'I am race.' And America IS race. From its symbolism to its substance, from its founding by slaveholders, to its rending by the Civil War, from Johnny Reb to Jim Crow, from the Ku Klux Klan to Katrina. "

The Associated Press contributed to this report.