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SPEECH?
The Education of the Bond Family
By James Bond

I HAVE consented to write the story
of the education of my family with
the sincere hope that it may help to
impress upon our young people the tre-
mendous importance of what is known
as collegiate and university training
and further may inspire young parents
to dedicate their lives to the most
sacred obligation of giving their chil-
dren the best education that they are
capable of taking and that the parents
are able to provide.

In the second place, it should be said
that my family is typical, there being
probably hundreds of Negro parents
who could tell a finer story of struggle
and achievement than I.

My family had a good mental,
moral and spiritual background. My
mother, a slave, was given away as a
wedding present to her young mistress
and taken from her mountain home
to the Bluegrass country at the age of
fifteen. After Emancipation she re-
turned to her original home, taking
with her her two sons who first saw
the light in the closing days of the
Civil War.

Single handed and facing obstacles
that to ordinary women would have
been insurmountable and with pro-
phetic vision, this unlettered slave
mother set herself to the task of edu-
cating her two sons, of giving them
what was called in those days a "classi-
cal education". How well she per-
formed her task may be judged from
the story that follows.

Fired by the teaching of my mother,
at the age of sixteen with all of my
belongings in a pillow case and driv-
ing a steer, I started out to get an
education. I walked the entire dis-
tance of seventy-five miles to. Berea
College where a few years later my
brother Henry followed me. Enter-
ing the primary department, after thir-
teen years of experiences that would
fill a book, ranging all the way from
comedy to tragedy, I was graduated
with the degree of B. S. Three years
in Oberlin Graduate School of The-
ology gave me the degree of B. D.,
followed later by the degrees of M. S.
and D. D. from Berea.

Henry, the younger son, having also
received his education at Berea re-
turned to his mountain home in eastern
Kentucky where he became a promi-
nent attorney, land-owner and influen-
tial citizen. Of his nine children,
seven have completed collegiate and
professional courses in such schools as
Knoxville, Meharry, Rush Medical
College, two becoming physicians, one
a college professor. The two youngest
April 1927

How a colored man put his
whole family through college

children are now students in Knoxville
College.

My wife, Jane Alice Brown Bond,
whose early training was received
in the public schools of Washing-
ton, D. C., and Dunbar, Pa., gradu-
ated from Oberlin with an A. B.
degree in 1893, with high honors,
having worked her way through col-
lege as a private secretary to one of her
teachers. She also was blest with
a mother of vision, of prophetic in-
[group photographs
The Bond Family.]

sight and of indomitable courage and
also possessed with a passion for the
education of her children.

Our children had, therefore, a sub-
stantial background and began their
young lives in an atmosphere of deep
religious fervor, intellectual intensity
and altruistic idealism. The domi-
nant note in our home was Christian
education, "classical" or "higher" edu-
cation.

MUCH of the education of our
children was done in the home.
We felt that the mere imparting of
knowledge, rule and formula, impor-
tant as it was, was rather a minor part
of training for life work, that the set-
ting up of proper ideas, the creating
of the proper kind of attitudes, the
storing up in reservoir, supplies of
physical, moral and spiritual power,
constituted the big elements in edu-

cation. We therefore provided for
our children books, papers, magazines
and bent every effort to cultivate in
the youngsters a love of good litera-
ture. I taught them to swim, to fish,
to shoot. We hiked together, spent
nights out in the open discussing the
mysteries of the worlds about us and
slept beneath the stars, wrapped in our
blankets. It was a happy day for me
when the older boys could bring down
game birds with more accuracy than
their father. One of the proudest
moments of my life was the day when
for the first time these boys undertook
to swim the Cumberland River, while
I sat on the bank anxiously watching
the effort. As they climbed out on the

other side and rested their tired wet
bodies in the sand, my heart beat with
proud expectations, for had they not
won out in the first real adventure in
which they had risked their lives and
was not this to be typical of their
lives ever afterward; was not life itself
a venture, a risk, a struggle; and was
it not my duty to see that these boys
were trained for this great adventure;
and was it not true that much of this
training must be done before they
reached the college or university? And
in this advenure, this struggle, were
they not to need more than almost any-
thing else pluck, courage, determina-
tion, the never-give-up spirit? Remem-
bering my own struggles I knew that
it had been these elements that had car-
ried me through, for in my thirteen
years of struggle at Berea there was
not a single day that I had not rather
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