Horace Mann Bond employer Clark Atlanta University
Critique of intelligence testing
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?".: 200 In 1956 a group of White Southern Senators signed the Southern Manifesto in opposition to racial integration and the Brown vs. Board of Education decision. They argued that African Americans were not sufficiently intelligent to participate in the same schools as Whites. Bond published a parody of the arguments of the signing senators using the data he had first collected and published in 1924. He published the results in an essay titled ""Intelligence of Congressmen Who Signed the 'Southern Manifesto' as Measured by IQ Tests". Here he concluded that based on the Army intelligence tests the average of signing senators was in the lowest 20% of American Whites, on average signatories attended a college of the lowest ten percent of median National scores, and had a constituency whose majority was in the intelligence category of "morons". Consequently, Bond concluded, the logical policy recommendation following the reasoning of the senators, would be to segregate the slow-learning signatories into a group together where they could have "remedial attention to make up for their basic deficiencies". The essay was published by the NAACP and attracted widespread hilarity or uproar depending on viewpoint. Bond later referred to the essay as "his little foolishness", but he maintained that he had made a significant point.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.
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