Horace Mann Bond

Educator and scholar

• Born: November 8, 1904
• Birthplace: Nashville, Tennessee
• Died: December 21, 1972
• Place of death: Atlanta, Georgia

The father of civil rights pioneer Julian Bond, Bond is an important but virtually forgotten figure. A noted scholar whose research focused on the social, environmental, and historical aspects of African American education in the South, he was a longtime professor and administrator at several historically black colleges and universities.

Early Life

Horace Mann Bond was born in Nashville, Tennessee, the fifth of six children born to James and Jane Alice Bond. His father, who held degrees from Berea College and Oberlin Seminary, was an itinerant Congregationalist minister. His mother, also a graduate of Oberlin College, was a schoolteacher for many years.

Educated in private schools throughout the South as a result of his father’s travels, Bond entered the Talladega College High School in 1914, at the age of nine. Between 1916 and 1918, he attended the Atlanta University High School before graduating from Lincoln Institute, Kentucky, in 1919.

In 1919, Bond entered Lincoln University in Oxford, Pennsylvania, where he received an A.B. degree in 1923. He was granted admission into the University of Chicago in 1924 to pursue his master’s degree in sociology. After only two terms, he left to accept a position as the director of the Department of Education at the Colored Agricultural and Normal University of Oklahoma in Langston. In 1926, he returned to Chicago and completed his M.A. in education.

For the next decade—between 1926 and 1936—Bond taught and worked in various historically black colleges and universities while pursuing his doctoral degree at the University of Chicago. For one year, 1927-1928, he served as the director of the extension program at the Alabama State College in Montgomery.

In 1928, Bond accepted a position as an instructor of education and research assistant at Fisk University in Nashville, Tennessee. In 1929, he left academia to conduct survey field research for the Julius Rosenwald Fund before returning to Fisk University in 1932 as an associate professor of education.

In 1935, Bond was offered and accepted the position of dean of Dillard University in New Orleans. In 1936, he completed his doctorate in the history of education. A year later, in 1937, Bond returned to Fisk to serve as the head of the Department of Education. He remained in Tennessee until 1939.

Life’s Work

Between 1924 and 1939, Bond published thirty-nine articles, four book reviews, and two books. Among his early writings were “Intelligence Tests and Propaganda” (1924), “What the Army Intelligence Tests Measured” (1924), and “Some Exceptional Negro Children” (1927). In 1934, he published The Education of the Negro in the American Social Order and in 1939, his doctoral thesis was published under the title The Negro Education in Alabama: A Study in Cotton and Steel. In 1939, Bond became the president of Fort Valley State College in Georgia. He left Georgia in 1945 to assume the presidency of Lincoln University.

In the fall of 1957, Bond accepted the position of dean at the College of Education at Atlanta University. By 1966, he was serving as the director of university’s Bureau of Educational and Social Research. During his years at Atlanta University, Bond continued to write and conduct research in the area of African American education. In 1967, he published A Study of Factors Involved in the Identification and Encouragement of Unusual Academic Talent Among the Underprivileged Populations, a study sponsored by the U.S. Department of Health, Education, and Welfare whose purpose was to ascertain the social and economic backgrounds of black holders of doctoral degrees across the American South.

On December 21, 1972, one year after retiring from Atlanta University, Bond died of natural causes. He was sixty-eight years old.

Significance

The author of eighty-six articles, six books, and numerous studies, Bond was a prolific writer and scholar whose early scholarship was highly critical of the intelligence testing that saw a resurgence in the 1920’s and 1930’s.

Bond’s impact on and contributions to the study of the history of education in the South is substantial. For nearly fifty years, he served as an educator, scholar, and administrator, playing a vital role in the documenting and researching of black education in the American South as well as in Africa. As part of his vision for black higher education, Bond worked tirelessly to transform the two universities he led from underfunded and neglected institutions into comprehensive, well-regarded research and teaching universities. A shrewd negotiator, Bond was a man ahead his time; he was able to accomplish much during dangerous and tumultuous times while forging an admirable life and career.

Bibliography

Bond, Horace Mann. “A Cigarette for Johnnie Birchfield.” In Rhetoric, Religion, and the Civil Rights Movement, 1954-1965, edited by Davis W. Houck and David E. Dixon. Studies in Rhetoric and Religion 1. Waco, Tex.: Baylor University Press, 2006. Transcript of a speech Bond gave to the State Teachers Association in Montgomery, Alabama, in 1956. Bond spins his brief interaction with Birchfield, a white inmate on death row, into a larger rumination on religion, race, and activism.

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗. “Intelligence Tests and Propaganda.” The Crisis 28 (June, 1924): 61-64. Bond’s first publication challenging the myth of black intellectual inferiority, written for the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) magazine The Crisis.

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗. “What the Army Intelligence Tests Measured.” Opportunity 2 (July, 1924): 197-202. The second article published by Bond critically examines intelligence testing and its racist applications.

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗. “Some Exceptional Children.” The Crisis 28 (October, 1927): 257-259. The third article in Bond’s series of publications debunking assumptions of black intellectual inferiority.

Fultz, Michael. “A ’Quintessential American’: Horace Mann Bond, 1924-1939.” Harvard Educational Review 55, no. 4 (November, 1985): 416-442. This well-written article examines the early years of Bond’s career as a teacher and scholar.

Norton, Rita. “The Horace Mann Bond Papers: A Biography of Change.” The Journal of Negro Education 53, no. 1 (1984): 29-40. This article was written to commemorate the release of the Horace Mann Bond papers at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst.

Urban, Wayne J. Black Scholar: Horace Mann Bond, 1904-1972. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1992. This full-length biography of Bond is a dated but important work about his life and career.