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SOUTHERN UNIVERSITY PRESS
Academic and Professional Communication
SECOND AVENUE AT NINETEENTH STREET BIRMINGHAM

September 30, 1968

Hon. Julian Bond
State Representative
State Capitol Building
Atlanta, Georgia

Dear Julian:

I am glad we got to know each other. Your ability and diversity and spark and potential for great leadership seem clearly promising to me.

I like you and respect your ability, your processes, your approach and your superb savoir faire - and you really should have a book. I was perfectly serious about this and am restating it so you will know this.

Bright ideas are not particularly uncommon but actually doing something is a pitifully rare event. So I would like to suggest to you the following course of action.

Send to me now copies of your four principal speeches. Write a scribbled memo on just one sheet of paper as a thumbnail critique of these speeches, noting three things:

First, what you consider the weaker points to be.
Second, those you consider the strongest and most effective.
Third, with or without regard to these particular speeches,
please comment on the highlights yhou feel most important
and most deeply believe in.

Step 2. I will assemble a single presentation from all these things, using your scibbled notations as guidelines for philosophy and chief purpose.

This draft I will sent to you. You go through it only once with the advantage of freshness and without the disadvantages of retracing, complex thinking and over-improvement. Make notes all over it, criticize yourself, criticize what I have done. Send it back. I will re-draft it and return it again to you. This time you can study it and look for refinements. But you must set yourself a short deadline. I'll send you postcards and call you on the telephone and we will get together all within a short period of time to make it happen. The purpose of the short time is not just to make it happen but to fight the loss of freshness and spark and personality and integrity that time and knit-picking and rationalizations seem to take away.