Julian Bond was a civil rights leader for more than 50 years, a narrator for various documentaries, and was a host on the second season of Saturday Night Live.

Bond became involved in the civil rights movement while he was a student at Morehouse College, in Atlanta, where he took a class alongside Martin Luther King, Jr., and participated in sit-ins. Bond was one of the founders of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), which was one of the most important civil rights organizations in the South during the 1960s, and he served as its communications director from 1961 to 1966.

In 1965 he was elected to the Georgia House of Representatives, but was not given a seat based on his opposition to the Vietnam War. Bond sued, and the following year the Supreme Court ruled in his favor. He served in the Georgia House from 1967-75 and then in the Georgia Senate from 1975-87.

The case brought him national attention and earned him a spot hosting SNL in 1977, with musical guests Tom Waits and Brick. That same year he appeared in the Richard Pryor film Greased Lighting. He also appeared in documentaries and narrated many more, including Eyes on the Prize, a PBS television documentary series about the American Civil Rights Movement from 1952 to 1965. Additionally, he narrated the Academy Award-nominated Adam Clayton Powell and the television documentary series American Experience, which covered a variety of topics in American history. From 1980 to 1997 he anchored the syndicated news program America’s Black Forum.

In 1998, he was elected chairman of the NAACP, a position he held until 2010.

Bond died August 15, 2015, in Fort Walton Beach, Florida. He was 75.