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ELIZABETH GRITTER:

Then you went to a Quaker School. [unclear] A little bit in Pennsylvania. I was wondering how that influenced your views of that school? I know the Quakers are pacifists.

JULIAN BOND:

Yes, well the first thing to remember is that I was living in a community where they had one-room schools. They were segregated when we got there. Black school on this side of the street, white school on this side of the street. My parents filed a lawsuit. They closed this school, and all the black kids come over here. So I went to one-room schools until I went to high school. Before I went to high school, I never went to a school with an indoor toilet. I went to schools with outhouses. The local high school was, I think it was called, the Lower Oxford Township Consolidated High School. It just couldn't have been a very good school. Small, Pennsylvania town, just couldn't have been a very good school. So my parents wanted me to get a better education. So they had already sent my sister, who is older, to a prep school in Massachusetts. I don't know if it was I didn't want to go so far away, or what it was, but anyway, they chose this school near Philadelphia called the George School, a co-ed Quaker school, and I went to school there. It was a wonderful school. It was far superior to the kind of education I could've gotten at a public school. It was small. It was intimate. It was a Quaker school, and it exposed me to Quakerism and to nonviolence in a way that never would've happened had I gone to a public [school]. So it gave me an early introduction into nonviolence. Now I have to say I never thought that I could use this in any way, never clicked in my mind. But when the civil rights movement came along, years later, I had this foundation that most of my colleagues didn't have.