Horace Mann Bond

American academic administrator and historian

Horace Mann Bond (November 8, 1904 – December 21, 1972) was an American historian, college administrator, social science researcher and the father of civil rights leader Julian Bond. He earned graduate and doctoral degrees from University of Chicago at a time when only a small percentage of any young adults attended any college. 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. In 1945, he became the first African American president of Lincoln University in Pennsylvania.

Horace was born November 8, 1904, in Nashville, Tennessee, the grandson of enslaved Africans. Both his parents were college educated. His mother, Jane Alice Browne, was a schoolteacher, and his father, James Bond, was a minister who served at Congregational churches across the South, often associated with historically black colleges. His mother had graduated from Oberlin College in Ohio, and his father graduated from Berea College in Berea, Kentucky, in 1892. James Bond later served as a Berea College Trustee from 1896 to 1914. Both Berea and Oberlin are among the first colleges that were interracial. His parents were among the black elite with their educations and encouraged their children in academic achievement. Horace was the sixth of seven children. One of his brothers, J. Max Bond, Sr., became a prominent educator. During his childhood, Bond had several unpleasant encounters with whites. In one incident a white man shot at their house after having a fight with Horace's older brothers. In another, his father was arrested by a white neighbor, who was a police officer, when the Bond family moved into an all white street. Bond excelled in school, entering high school at the age of nine and college at fourteen. Bond graduated in 1923 at age 19 with honors from Lincoln University, a historically black college in Pennsylvania. He was a member of Kappa Alpha Psi fraternity. At Penn State, where he went for graduate work, Bond realized that he was able to compete with white classmates, and earned competitive grades above the 90th percentile. Later Bond returned to Lincoln University to work as an instructor. Bond then suffered the only setback to his success; he was dismissed from the college for tolerating a gambling ring in a dormitory which he was supervising. Despite his embarrassment at Lincoln, Bond achieved a reputation as a fine scholar and administrator. Bond earned the M. A. and Ph. D degrees from the University of Chicago, where his dissertation on black education in Alabama won the Rosenberger Prize in 1936. It was published in 1939. As was customary in those years, Bond taught at a variety of academic institutions before completing his doctorate. He published his first academic book in 1934. His early work was recognized by the Rosenwald Fund, which granted him fellowships in 1931 and 1932 and went on to support most of the rest of his career.

Bond married Julia Agnes Washington in 1930 She was a student he met while teaching at Fisk University in Nashville, Tennessee in the 1920s. Julia Washington was from a wealthy and prominent African American family of mixed race in Nashville. She and Horace had three children: Jane Margaret, born 1939; Horace Julian, born in 1940; and James, born in 1944. Bond and his wife had high expectations for all three of their children.

Bond's first publications were in the NAACP magazine The Crisis in 1924. Here, following the publication of Brigham's analysis of Army intelligence tests he critiqued the logic behind Brighams conclusions that the lower African American test scores indicated an inherent intellectual inferiority of the Negro race. Bond, concluded that "the medial score of White soldiers from the states of Mississippi, Kentucky, Arkansas, and Georgia, averaged  the mental age of a twelve and a half year old child". And he asked "Are the exponents of intelligence tests as discriminators of racial differences prepared to assert that the white population of Arkansas is inherently and racially inferior to the whites of another section of the country?". In 1958 Audrey Shuey's "The Testing of Negro Intelligence" was published, concluding, mostly based on old intelligence studies that Bond and others had refuted in the 1920s, that the intelligence of African Americans was innately inferior to that of Whites. Bond published a scathing review in which he showed that Shuey ignored many contradictory studies, and used biased methods of comparison, for example comparing Southern black test scores with the White national average, instead of the much lower Southern White scores. Bond concluded that all Shuey had proven was that "everywhere in the United States the American negro is a subordinated underprivileged social caste". He then returned with his family to the South, becoming dean of the School of Education at Atlanta University (later Clark Atlanta University). Bond later served as director of the Bureau of Educational and Social Research at the university. He retired in 1971. His papers are archived at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. In his research, he studied the social, economic, and geographic factors influencing academic achievement of black children.