Horace Mann Bond facts for kids
Quick facts for kids
Horace Mann Bond
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| President of Lincoln University |
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| In office 1945–1957 |
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| Preceded by | Walter Livingston Wright |
| Succeeded by | Armstead Otey Grubb |
| President of Fort Valley State College |
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| In office 1939–1945 |
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| Succeeded by | Cornelius V. Troup |
| Personal details | |
| Born | November 8, 1904 Nashville, Tennessee, U.S. |
| Died | December 21, 1972 (aged 68) Atlanta, Georgia, U.S. |
| Alma mater | Lincoln University University of Chicago |
Horace Mann Bond (November 8, 1904 – December 21, 1972) was an American historian and college leader. He was also a researcher who studied society. He is known as the father of civil rights leader Julian Bond.
Horace Bond earned his master's and doctorate degrees from the University of Chicago. This was at a time when very few young adults went to college. He became an important leader at several historically black colleges. In 1939, he was named the first president of Fort Valley State University in Georgia. There, he helped the college grow its programs and money. In 1945, he became the first African-American president of Lincoln University in Pennsylvania.
Contents
Early Life and School Years
Horace Bond was born on November 8, 1904, in Nashville, Tennessee. His grandparents had been enslaved. Both of his parents went to college. His mother, Jane Alice Browne, was a teacher. His father, James Bond, was a minister who worked at Congregational churches across the South. These churches were often connected to historically black colleges.
Horace's mother graduated from Oberlin College in Ohio. His father graduated from Berea College in Kentucky in 1892. Both Berea and Oberlin were among the first colleges to welcome students of all races. Horace's parents were part of a group of educated black people. They encouraged their children to do well in school.
Horace was the sixth of seven children. His brother, J. Max Bond, Sr., also became a well-known educator. As a child, Horace had some difficult experiences with white people. Once, a white man shot at their house after a fight with Horace's older brothers. Another time, his father was arrested by a white police officer. This happened when the Bond family moved onto a street where only white families lived.
Horace was very good at school. He started high school when he was nine years old and college at fourteen. He graduated from Lincoln University in Pennsylvania in 1923 at age 19. He was a member of the Kappa Alpha Psi fraternity. At Penn State, where he did graduate work, Horace found he could do just as well as his white classmates. He earned very high grades.
Later, Bond returned to Lincoln University to teach. He faced a challenge when he was dismissed from the college. This happened because he allowed a gambling ring in a dorm he was watching over. Despite this, Bond became known as a great scholar and leader.
Bond earned his master's (M.A.) and doctorate (Ph.D.) degrees from the University of Chicago. His Ph.D. paper about black education in Alabama won an award in 1936. It was published in 1939. Before finishing his doctorate, Bond taught at many different schools. He published his first academic book in 1934. His early work was supported by the Rosenwald Fund, which gave him money for his research.
Family Life
Horace Bond married Julia Agnes Washington in 1929. He met her when he was teaching at Fisk University in Nashville, Tennessee. Julia Washington came from a wealthy and important African-American family in Nashville.
Horace and Julia had three children: Jane Margaret, born in 1939; Horace Julian, born in 1940; and James, born in 1944. Both parents had high hopes for all their children.
Jane Bond Moore became a lawyer who focused on job discrimination. James Bond was a politician and served on the Atlanta City Council. Julian Bond (1940-2015) was a very famous leader in the Civil Rights Movement in the 1960s. He helped start the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), a group of black college students. Julian Bond was elected to the state legislature in Georgia and served for 20 years. He became nationally known for his social work and political career.
Career in Education
While finishing his doctorate, Bond taught at several historically black universities. These included Langston University in Oklahoma, Fisk University in Tennessee, and Dillard University in Louisiana.
He moved up in college leadership roles. He became dean at Dillard University in 1934. Later in the 1930s, he became chairman of the education department at Fisk University.
In 1939, Bond became the first president of Fort Valley State College in Fort Valley, Georgia. He served there until 1945. During his time, he helped the college grow into a four-year school. He also doubled the school's income and tripled the money it received from the state. These were big achievements, especially for a black college during the time of segregation.
In 1945, Bond was chosen to be the president of Lincoln University. He was the first African American to hold this position. He served at his old college until 1957. During these years, he began researching for his book about the history of Lincoln University.
In 1953, Bond worked with historians John Hope Franklin and C. Vann Woodward. Their research helped the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) in their important U.S. Supreme Court case, Brown v. Board of Education (1954). This case led to the end of segregation in public schools.
Challenging Intelligence Tests
Horace Bond's first writings appeared in the NAACP magazine The Crisis in 1924. At that time, some people used intelligence tests to claim that African Americans were less intelligent. Bond strongly disagreed with these ideas. He showed that the tests were unfair and did not truly measure intelligence. He pointed out that white soldiers from certain Southern states also had low scores. He asked if that meant those white people were "inherently inferior."
In 1956, some white Southern Senators signed the Southern Manifesto. This statement was against racial integration and the Brown v. Board of Education decision. They argued that African Americans were not smart enough to go to school with white students. Bond wrote a funny but serious essay that made fun of their arguments. He used the same kind of test data they used. He showed that, by their own logic, the senators who signed the manifesto would be considered less intelligent. He said they should be put in a special group for "remedial attention." The NAACP published this essay. It caused a lot of laughter or anger, depending on who read it. Bond called it "his little foolishness," but he believed he had made a very important point.
In 1958, a book called "The Testing of Negro Intelligence" was published. It claimed that African Americans were naturally less intelligent than white people. Bond wrote a very strong review of this book. He showed that the author ignored many studies that proved her wrong. He also showed that she used unfair ways to compare groups. For example, she compared test scores of black people in the South to the national average for white people. She should have compared them to white people in the South, whose scores were much lower. Bond concluded that the book only proved that "everywhere in the United States the American negro is a subordinated underprivileged social caste."
After his time at Lincoln, Bond and his family moved back to the South. He became dean of the School of Education at Atlanta University (which later became Clark Atlanta University). Bond later directed the Bureau of Educational and Social Research at the university. He retired in 1971.
Friendship with Albert Barnes
While he was president of Lincoln University, Bond became friends with Albert C. Barnes. Barnes was a businessman and art collector who started the nearby Barnes Foundation. Barnes believed in education for working people and took a special interest in students from Lincoln University.
Barnes set up his foundation so that Lincoln University would control its board of trustees. This meant the university would oversee one of the world's largest private art collections. This collection included very valuable Impressionist and Modern art.
Books
- The Education of the Negro in the American Social Order(1934)
- The Education of the Negro in Alabama: A Study in Cotton and Steel (1939)
- "Black American Scholars: A Study of their Beginnings" (1972)
- Education for Freedom: A History of Lincoln University (1976)
- The Star Creek Journal (1997), with Julia W. Bond, edited by Adam Fairclough
He also wrote strong criticisms of racial claims about intelligence. One of his most famous essays was "Racially Stuffed Shirts and Other Enemies of Mankind." This essay made fun of the ideas about race that were common in the 1950s.
His writings and research papers are kept at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. In his studies, he looked at how social, economic, and geographic factors affected how well black children did in school.
