Horace Mann Bond

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Horace Mann Bond (November 8, 1905 – December 21, 1972) was an American educator, writer, and the father of civil-rights leader Julian Bond. Horace was the grandson of slaves and the child of an extraordinary couple. His mother was a schoolteacher, his father a minister, both of whom had attended Oberlin College. He was the sixth of seven children. Bond excelled in school, graduating from high school at the age of fourteen.

Bond graduated from Lincoln University at 19, and would later become the first African American president of his alma mater from (1945-1957). Bond quickly proved himself to be an extraordinary leader, graduating with honors from Lincoln University in 1923. While taking classes at Pennsylvania State College, Horace earned grades higher than those of his white classmates and later returned to Lincoln University 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 that he was supervising. Despite his embarrassment at Lincoln, Bond maintained a reputation as a fine scholar.

Bond married Julia Agnes Washington, a student he met while on the Fisk faculty in the 1920’s, in 1929. Julia Washington was from a wealthy and prominent African-American family in Nashville, Tennessee, and she and Horace had three children: Jane Margaret, born 1939; Horace Julian, born in 1940; and James, born in 1945. He had high expectations for all three of his children, expectations that were initially only met by his daughter. His son, Horace Julian, became a leader in the black college student wing of the civil rights movement in the 1960s, went on to become a state legislator is Georgia, and in his political activism achieved a fame that had eluded his father.

Horace Mann Bond earned the M.A. and Ph.D degrees from the University of Chicago, where his dissertation won the Rosenberger Prize in 1936. Bond worked at a variety of academic institutions before finishing his doctorate, including Langston University in Langston, Oklahoma; Fisk University in Nashville, Tennessee; and Dillard University in New Orleans, Louisiana. He worked his way up In the hierarchy of black colleges, becoming dean at Dillard in 1934 and chairman of the education department at Fisk University later in that decade. Bond was also the first president of Fort Valley State University, in Fort Valley, Georgia in 1939.

Horace Mann Bond also befriended Albert C. Barnes, founder of the Barnes Foundation, who later changed the bylaws of the foundation to make it possible for Lincoln University to one day control the foundation's board of trustees, and thereby overseeing on of the largest private art collections in the world worth over $2 billion. The Barnes Foundation recently contested Albert C. Barnes' will and Lincoln University's control. A settlement was brokered by Pennsylvania Governor Edward Rendell in 2005.

Horace Mann Bond authored Education for Freedom: A History of Lincoln University; The Education of the Negro in the American Social Order, and The Education of the Negro in Alabama.

Bond suffered a minor attack by the Kul Klux Klan at the age of eight years old and was scarred emotionally for life. The Klan jumped him and almost stabbed him.

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