Horace Mann Bond's Negro Education in Alabama

Abstract

The recent opening of the Horace Mann Bond Papers to scholars, along with publication of an article on Bond's early career which used those papers, should spark renewed interest in the work of this noted teacher, scholar, and educational administrator. Visitors to the Bond Papers, housed at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, will find a wealth of unpublished and published material relating to many notable events in the educational history of the twentieth century. Bond's interests were broad, encompassing both humanistic and social scientific approaches to the educational and social problems of blacks. He wrote noted critiques of the mental testing movement at several stages of his long career, did historical research for the plaintiffs in the Brown v. Topeka school desegregation suit, and traveled extensively to Africa and studied its civilizations in the later stages of his career.1 One of Bond's greatest contributions to scholarship is the topic of this essay: his doctoral dissertation which was published in 1939 under the title Negro Education in Alabama: A Study in Cotton and Steel. The merits of Bond's book were noted almost immediately after its publication. W. E. B. DuBois praised Bond's work in a review published in the American Historical Review, and it was also treated favorably in reviews published in the Journal of Negro Education, the Journal of Southern History, and the Mississippi Valley Historical Review. One year after its publication, the noted historian Howard K. Beale relied on Bond's