Born: November 8, 1904, Nashville, TN

Education: Lincoln University (PA), B.A. 1923; University of Chicago, M.A., 1926, Ph.D. 1936

Died: December 21, 1972, Atlanta, GA

Lincoln University (1854) was “the first institution found anywhere in the world to provide a higher education in the arts and sciences for male youth of African descent” (Green, 2006, p. 49). Bond, an alumnus, became its first black president (1945–57).

He pursued scholarship and racial justice. His seminal The Education of the Negro in the American Social Order (1934) concluded that blacks’ inferior schools were attributable to color and class segregation. The same year, with research funds from the Rosenwald Fund, Bond and his wife (Julia) studied African American schooling in the Star Creek District of Washington Parish, Louisiana; they unveiled financial neglect, family poverty, and racist violence. Bond's Negro Education in Alabama: A Study in Cotton and Steele (1939) demonstrated that Reconstruction seeded universal literacy in America. He promoted black self-help, interracial cooperation, and federal implementation of “equal protection.” Cofounder of the United Negro College Fund and Southern Regional Council, both in 1944, he helped to develop the NAACP's brief for Brown v. Board of Education. During the 1960s he publicly backed the Atlanta student sit-ins as well as African anticolonial struggles. Bond conducted other studies in support of school desegregation and equal educational opportunity.