“When people tell me nothing has changed, I think, are you nuts? Come on. When I was the age of my students, I couldn’t go to a movie theater. I couldn’t be a policeman in downtown Atlanta. I could be a policeman, as a matter of fact, but I couldn’t arrest white people. There’s just a raft of things I could not do. And I can do all these things now,” said civil rights activist Julian Bond when he visited Dartmouth last October. Then, said Bond, who died Aug. 15 at age 75, “If you tell me things have not changed enough, I’ll say absolutely right. You’re absolutely right.”

In this video from his visit, Bond speaks with students, faculty, and community members about how he first became involved in the civil rights movement, what activism means to him, and the role of art in social change. He was on campus to celebrate the exhibition “Witness: Art and Civil Rights in the Sixties” at the Hood Museum of Art.

Over the course of his long career, Bond was a leader in advocating for social change, from his work as a founding member of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee in the 1960s to his service as chair of the board of the NAACP from 1998 to 2010.