Horace Mann Bond member of Kappa Alpha Psi
Early life and education
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.
part of belonging to affiliated with associated with connected to