Julian Bond, the civil rights leader and former chairman of the NAACP, has passed away at a hospital. He was 75.

Bond was one of the foremost figures in the civil rights movement of the 1960s, winning a Supreme Court challenge in 1966 in order to be seated on the state legislature of Georgia, and fighting discrimination for decades as the head of the Southern Poverty Law Center, the NAACP, and as a professor at both the University of Virginia and American University, according to a Washington Post report.

He passed away at a hospital in Fort Walton Beach in Florida on Aug. 15. He apparently became ill during a vacation and died from vascular disease complications, said his wife, Pamela Horowitz, according to the report.

Bond was once a student of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. at Morehouse College in Atlanta, and soon became involved in the civil rights movement as a teenager.