College/University President

Horace Mann Bond was born in Nashville, Tennessee, to Jane Bond and James Bond, an educator and Methodist minister. Bond was a precocious child, attending high school at nine years old and Lincoln University (Pennsylvania), an African American liberal arts college, at age fourteen. After graduating from Lincoln in 1923, Bond attended the University of Chicago, earning a Ph.D. in education in 1936.

A number of publications in the early 1930s helped Bond establish his scholarly reputation. These included The Education of the Negro in the American Social Order (1934), in which he linked poor education among blacks to their inferior social and economic status, and his dissertation, Negro Education in Alabama: A Study of Cotton and Steel (1939), in which he argued that Reconstruction represented a positive step for blacks The latter work directly contradicted the scholarship of the ...

college professor and administrator, was born in Nashville, Tennessee, the son of James Bond, a Congregationalist minister, and Jane Alice Browne, a graduate of Oberlin College and a schoolteacher. Horace Bond's paternal grandmother, Jane Arthur Bond, was a slave who raised two sons by herself. These two sons, Bond's father and his uncle, Henry, both earned college degrees and embarked on professional careers. Three of Bond's four siblings earned college degrees, and his cousins on his father's side also distinguished themselves academically. This family achievement was important to Horace Bond, because it exemplified the way in which numerous scholars of his generation were nurtured within the African American community. He published a book on the family origins of African American scholars near the end of his life, Black American Scholars: A Study of Their Beginnings (1972).

Bond was an intellectually precocious child He was ...

educator and scholar. The grandson of slaves, Horace Mann Bond was born in Nashville, Tennessee, to two graduates of Oberlin College, Jane Alice Browne, a schoolteacher, and James Bond, a minister. Named after the abolitionist and educator Horace Mann, Bond was an academic prodigy, graduating from high school at the age of fourteen. He attended Lincoln University in Pennsylvania and was something of a mascot to his older classmates. Labeled the “class baby” by some, Bond proved himself a leader, becoming involved in a number of activities, including the school newspaper, debate, and a social fraternity. Bond graduated from Lincoln with honors in 1923, at the age of eighteen.

Following graduation Bond was offered a teaching post at Lincoln in preparation he took graduate courses at Pennsylvania State College While at Penn State Bond excelled academically but he encountered racism from a white professor who refused ...

educator and university president, was born in Hazelnut, Mississippi, one of seven children of William Levi, a Church of God in Christ minister, and Byneter Markham Levi. Her father, whom Smith cited as her primary role model, encouraged his daughters to stay in school so they could become self-reliant. In 1953 Smith enrolled in Jackson State College (now Jackson State University) with the intention of becoming a nurse. After taking a dislike to the laboratory work and practical requirements of nursing, she shifted her focus to teaching. In 1957 Smith married Leroy Smith, whom she met at Jackson State; they would have two sons and a daughter. A month after her marriage, Smith graduated from college.

She began her career in education as an elementary school teacher in the public schools of Mississippi Alabama and Tennessee Smith s collegiate career began at Tuskegee University Smith and ...