Author Description

In Black Scholar, Wayne J. Urban chronicles the distinguished life and career of the historian, teacher, and university administrator Horace Mann Bond, illuminating not only the man and his accomplishments but also the many struggles that confronted those involved in black education during the middle decades of this century. A graduate of Lincoln University and the University of Chicago, Bond wrote six scholarly books and numerous articles and remained committed. Throughout his life to the concerns of black education. In his early research, he became involved in intelligence testing and argued in his writings (some of them published in W.E.B. Du Bois's journal the Crisis) for the primacy of environment over heredity in the interpretation of test results. During the 1930s, he published his two most notable books, The Education of the Negro in the American Social Order and the prize-winning Negro Education in Alabama: A Study in. Cotton and Steel which marked him as a scholar of great promise. Also early in his career, he worked for the Julius Rosenwald Fund and began a two-decade-long acquaintance with its president, Edwin Embree. Unfortunately, Bond's early promise as a scholar remained largely unfulfilled. Because segregation kept him from finding a permanent academic home that could facilitate his research, he became an administrator at several black institutions, including Fort Valley State. College, Lincoln University, and Atlanta University. He felt considerable frustration as the demands of administrative work hampered his scholarly endeavors. In addition to his work in this country, Bond traveled frequently to Africa during the 1940s and 1950s, striving to encourage relations between Africans and African Americans. The affinities between these groups--one struggling to break free from colonialism, the other from segregation--were great, but again Bond. Met with frustration as well as fulfillment. Politics and economic interests complicated the academic and cultural ties that he sought to promote. Horace Bond, who died in 1972, is today best remembered as the father of the civil-rights activist Julian Bond. Revealing the elder Bond as a significant figure in his own right, Black Scholar also reconstructs an era in which numerous black people of great academic promise found few outlets for their talents.