Bond charts Atlanta’s protest history during diversity and inclusion forum
After the protests and demonstrations following the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis, companies across the country have sought to build a better future by opening dialogues.
On Monday, June 8 and Wednesday, June 10, Heartland Coca-Cola, a bottling company that services Kansas, Missouri, and southern Illinois, held a WeHearYou live event to give employees an opportunity to speak up and engage in a constructive conversation aimed at making positive change. The remote live events were moderated by Post 1 At-Large Council member Michael Julian Bond and focused on topics related to discrimination and racial injustice.
One of Bond’s takeaways from the protests that have occurred in recent weeks is how it’s gained international attention and galvanized people in both the United States and abroad.
“I’m really moved to see the rest of the world be in sympathy with people who are still struggling for freedom in the United States,” Bond said. “This is an issue that’s been on the minds of people across the world. People are in sympathy against oppression. African Americans for decades have been a symbol to other people around the world because of the struggles that they have endured and prevailed through in the United States.”
He particularly noted the power of the movements to eliminate Apartheid in South Africa and the movement to fight the authoritarian government in Poland during the 1980s.
Bond’s background is deep in civil rights. Born and raised in Atlanta, he is the son of the late civil rights leader Julian Bond, and his wife, Alice.
“I come from a family of civil rights activists going back generations,” Bond said. “Here principally in Atlanta, my father and my mother were students who were part of the initiating group of the Atlanta Student Movement and the Committee on Appeal for Human Rights, whose work desegregated Atlanta in the 1960s and impacted the presidential election of 1960.”
He added that the arrest of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in 1960 as part of the civil rights movement and the impact of the Atlanta Student Movement’s sit-in demonstrations put a spotlight on the movement and helped it gain enough traction to put it on the agenda of that year’s presidential campaign between John Kennedy and Richard Nixon, which was ultimately won by Kennedy.
For the protests that have occurred across the country in recent weeks, Bond said there’s a clear message that people need to be active and seek solutions.
“We need to protest. We need to raise our voices and we have to move our mouths, our hands, and our feet toward action and toward remedy,” Bond said.
He added that Atlanta’s history of negotiation and activism makes the city a unique place for other cities and places to emulate, noting the city’s mythology is based upon the quote and the moniker that Atlanta is the “city too busy to hate.”
“We’re still at that work,” he said. “We need to recognize that there are problems that need to be addressed and we need to be about the business of doing that.”
