Julian Bond embodied the best of America and set an example that inspires all of us to be better.

As a pioneering young leader of the civil rights movement, a longtime member of the Georgia legislature who was at first denied seating because of his antiwar views, Chair of the NAACP, and as a writer, scholar, and teacher, he was a brave and eloquent apostle of reason and decency in the fight for racial justice. While his personal journey is at an end, it seems fitting somehow that his passing comes as his beloved NAACP leads thousands of his comrades in a march across Georgia and much of the rest of the South to remind us of how far our nation has come and how far we still have to go.