Horace Mann Bond Papers, 1830-1979 : Scope & Contents of the Collection

Scope and Contents of the Collection

The Papers of Horace Mann Bond, who lived from 1904 to 1972, consist of personal and professional correspondence; administrative and teaching records; research data; manuscripts of published and unpublished speeches, articles and books; and Bond family papers. Fully represented in the Papers are Bond's two self-proclaimed major interests: black education, especially its history and sociological aspects, and Africa, particularly as related to educational and political conditions. The Papers span the years 1830 to 1979, with the bulk of the material falling in the period 1926 to 1972.

General correspondence, covering over forty years of Bond's exchanges with friends and professional contacts, accounts for approximately five percent of the collection. It includes correspondence for which Bond created no specific subject files. Access to particular correspondents is provided by the Series II description and by a selective name index to the correspondence (see Appendix).

Alphabetically arranged subject files make up nearly a third of the collection. Bond's affiliations with various educational, cultural and community organizations are well represented in these files. Of special interest are the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People folders, including some material relating to Bond's work on the 1954 United States Supreme Court desegregation case; field work reports to the Rosenwald Fund; and correspondence with and concerning W. E. B. Du Bois, Langston Hughes and Charles S. Johnson.

A large portion of the Papers documents Bond's career at several educational institutions. Atlanta University is represented primarily by over 300 family histories produced by Bond's students. Material relating to Bond's faculty and administrative posts at other institutions is substantive in content although not in bulk.

Material regarding Bond's educational research makes up approximately ten percent of the collection. His study of the economic and educational backgrounds of black doctorates is of particular interest, as are several less extensive projects concerning Southern educational institutions and standardized tests. A few items relate to Bond's PhD. thesis research on the history of black education in Alabama.

Writings in the collection span five decades, from a 1927 Crisis article to the posthumously published history of Lincoln University. They include newspaper articles written for the Associated Negro Press in the early 1930s; Bond's first book, Education of the Negro in the American Social Order, published in 1934; and the Harvard University Inglis Lecture presented by Bond in 1957.

The Bond family papers consist primarily of correspondence belonging to James Bond, Horace Bond's father, describing his activities in black and interracial organizations in Kentucky in the 1920s. Limited other material includes correspondence between Bond and his wife, children and brothers.

Bond's African interests are especially well represented in various parts of the collection. Included in the Papers are extensive correspondence and printed material pertaining to the continent; files relating to Kwame Nkrumah, the American Society for African Culture and the International African American Corporation; correspondence with potential African students at Lincoln University; research data on African students in American colleges; and numerous writings.

Each series is described in detail below. Horace Mann Bond established most of the subject categories within series; the staff of Special Collections and University Archives, in the process of integrating loose material, added others. Unless otherwise noted, papers within folders are arranged chronologically by year, month and day, with undated material following all dated material.

Series and folder numbers appearing in parentheses, e.g. (IV: 23), identify the locations of materials mentioned in the series descriptions. Cross-referencing of files is indicated by the use of "see" and "see also" preceding the series and folder designation.

Material removed from normal series location includes originals of oversize materials, newspaper clippings, and other items that have been copied for use in the collection, and whole issues of The New York Times and Time Magazine. The copies are in normal series location, while the originals are to be found in Series XI. A microfilm copy of"The Negro as an American Protestant Missionary in Africa," a Ph.D. dissertation written by W.C. Harr in 1945 at the University of Chicago, was transferred to the University of Massachusetts Library Microforms Collection. Only the relevant portions of periodical issues have been retained. About eleven linear feet of duplicate copies of materials, mostly printed, have been removed.