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Bond, Horace Mann
American educator and university administrator who directed the historical research in support of Brown v. Board of Education.Horace Mann Bond was born in Nashville, Tennessee, to Jane Bond and James Bond, an educator and Methodist minister. Bond was a precocious child, attending high school at nine years old and Lincoln University (Pennsylvania), an African American liberal arts college, at age fourteen. After graduating from Lincoln in 1923, Bond attended the University of Chicago, earning a Ph.D. in education in 1936.A number of publications in the early 1930s helped Bond establish his scholarly reputation. These included The Education of the Negro in the American Social Order (1934), in which he linked poor education among blacks to their inferior social and economic status, and his dissertation, Negro Education in Alabama: A Study of Cotton and Steel (1939), in which he argued that Reconstruction represented a positive step for blacks. The latter work directly contradicted the scholarship of the day.Bond drew the attention of the Julius Rosenwald Fund, which provided him with financial support throughout most of his career. The fund extended grants for his independent research and to universities with which he was affiliated. In 1934 Bond and his wife, Julia, traveled to Louisiana to document the progress of public schools in Washington Parish's Star Creek District, keeping a journal that was published in 1997. Titled the Star Creek Papers, the journal contains a portrait of Washington County, genealogical charts, and a record of the lynching of Jerome Wilson; it is considered to offer one of the finest depictions of the Depression-era South.Bond spent many years as an administrator at various black universities. From 1936 to 1939 he served as dean of Dillard University in New Orleans. In 1939 he became president of Fort Valley State Teachers College, leaving in 1945 to assume the presidency of his alma mater, Lincoln University. While at Lincoln he directed research for historical documentation in support of Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas, in which school segregation was outlawed. Leaving Lincoln in 1957, Bond then became president of Atlanta University, serving there until his retirement in 1971.During his educational career Bond became interested in Africa and supported the movements for African independence. He is the father of Julian Bond, the noted civil rights activist who became chairman of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) in 1998.
Bibliography
- Urban, W. J. Black Scholar Horace Mann Bond 1904–1972. The University of Georgia Press, 1992.
