Bond, Horace Mann

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Bond, Horace Mann

November 8, 1904
December 21, 1972

Teacher and administrator Horace Mann Bond was born in Nashville, Tennessee, the youngest of five sons of Jane Bond and James Bond, an educator and Methodist minister. He was named for Horace Mann, the nineteenth-century proponent of public education. When he was young, the family traveled throughout the South, settling near educational institutions with which James Bond was affiliated, including Berea College in Kentucky, Talladega College in Alabama, and Atlanta University. A precocious student, Horace Mann Bond entered high school when he was nine years old. While in high school, Bond moved with his family back to Kentucky, where his father served as chaplain during World War I at Camp Taylor.

In 1919, at the age of fourteen, Bond enrolled at Lincoln University, an African-American liberal arts college in southeastern Pennsylvania. After graduating from Lincoln in 1923, Bond entered the University of Chicago as a graduate student in education. While pursuing his Ph.D., he worked as a teacher and administrator at several African-American universities: Langston University in Oklahoma, Alabama Agricultural and Mechanical College, and Fisk University in Nashville, Tennessee.

In the early 1930s Bond gained a national reputation by publishing a number of articles in scholarly journals and popular magazines on black education in the South. In 1934 he published a major scholarly work, The Education of the Negro in the American Social Order, which argued that the poor quality of education among African Americans was directly linked to their lack of political and economic power. Bond did not recommend the abolition of segregated schools; instead, he called for equalization of the resources given to black and white children. In accordance with W. E. B. Du Bois's theory of the "talented tenth," Bond's book argued that young African Americans showing intellectual promise should be trained as future leaders.

While at Chicago, Bond developed a relationship with the Julius Rosenwald Fund, a philanthropic organization that provided funding for African-American scholars and universities. The fund supported Bond through most of his career, first with research fellowships that allowed him to publish widely and later with significant grants to the universities where he served as administrator.

In 1936, the same year he completed his dissertation on the development of public education in Alabama, Bond accepted the deanship of Dillard University, a newly reorganized black college in New Orleans. Bond remained at Dillard until 1939. That year he published his dissertation, Negro Education in Alabama: A Study of Cotton and Steel. The work was considered an important challenge to established scholarship on Reconstruction. Bond argued that Reconstruction was a significant step forward for black Americans, in particular in the educational institutions established during that period.

After the publication of Negro Education in Alabama, Bond devoted the rest of his career to the administration at black colleges, serving as president of Fort Valley State Teachers College in Georgia from 1939 to 1945 and as the first black president of Lincoln University in Pennsylvania from 1945 to 1957. In large part, his career was made by successfully lobbying for his institutions, often transforming them from underfunded colleges into comprehensive, well-respected research and teaching universities.

Bond had a variety of social involvements and intellectual interests. While at Lincoln University, he helped to direct research for a historical document supporting the challenge to segregation by the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) in the Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, Kansas, Supreme Court case. In the 1950s and 1960s Bond developed an interest in Africa. Through tours, lectures, and articles, he attempted to raise support among African Americans for independence movements in African countries. He was a leader of the American Society for African Culture, an organization funded by the Central Intelligence Agency, which both encouraged interest in African culture and warned against the dangers of communism in the African independence movements.

After Bond left Lincoln in 1957, he spent the rest of his career as an administrator at Atlanta University, first as dean of the School of Education and then as the director of the Bureau of Educational and Social Research. During the summer before his first year at Atlanta, Bond delivered the Alexander Inglis Lectures at Harvard University, published in 1959 under the title The Search for Talent, in which he argued that social circumstances determine the outcome of mental testing. In the last half of his career, Bond's scholarship focused primarily on social influences, and he often argued that IQ tests were biased against African Americans. He retired in 1971 and died in Atlanta in 1972.

Horace Mann Bond was the father of Julian Bond, the civil rights activist and politician.