November 8

Horace Mann Bond was an American historian, college professor and administrator, social science researcher and the father of civil-rights leader Julian Bond. He was an influential leader at several historically black colleges and was appointed the first president of Fort Valley State University in Georgia in 1939, where he managed its growth in programs and revenue.

Horace Mann Bond was born November 8, 1904 in Nashville, TN to parents who had been educated in the late nineteenth century at Oberlin and Berea colleges, and whose grandparents had been enslaved. His mother, Jane Alice Browne, was a schoolteacher, and his father, James Bond, was a Congregational minister.

Bond graduated with honors from Lincoln University, a historically Black college in Pennsylvania in 1923. He would go on to earn advanced degrees at the University of Chicago, an M.A. degree in 1926, and 10 years later a Ph.D. degree, where his dissertation on Black education in Alabama won the Rosenberger Prize in 1936. It was published in 1939.

During his years of study Bond taught at several institutions, including Langston University in Langston, OK, Fisk University in Nashville, and Dillard University in New Orleans.

In 1945, Bond was selected president of Lincoln University, the first African American to hold that position. He served there until 1957 and ultimately wrote a history of that institution.

During the movement for Black educational equality, Bond countered the claims of Black intellectual inferiority, issuing a number of stinging critiques of the racist arguments. His most well-known essay, “Racially Stuffed Shirts and Other Enemies of Mankind,” parodied the Segregationist Psychology of the 1950s. Much of Bond’s sociological research highlighted the social, economic, and geographic factors that effect the academic achievement of Black students.

In addition to the history of his alma mater, Education for Freedom: A History of Lincoln University, Bond published other works on Black education: The Education of the Negro in the American Social Order, and The Education of the Negro in Alabama.

In 1953, together with historians John Hope Franklin and C. Vann Woodward, Bond served as a scholarly consultant to the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) in its U.S. Supreme Court case of Brown v. Board of Education. After leaving Lincoln University, he served as Dean of the School of Education at Atlanta University — later Clark Atlanta University — and then Director of the Bureau of Educational and Social Research.

Horace Mann Bond retired in 1971 and died on December 21, 1972.

Footnotes:

• Huff, Christopher. “Horace Mann Bond.” New Georgia Encyclopedia, last modified Aug 15, 2013.
• Wikipedia contributors, “Horace Mann Bond,” Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia (accessed May 24, 2025).
• White, C. (2007, February 12). Horace Mann Bond (1904-1972). BlackPast.org.