Commencement Address at St. George's University, [Grenada?], 2000 May 12 (Doc 1 of 2)

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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 tremendous 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 children 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 returned 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 prophetic vision, this unlettered slave mother set herself to the task of educating her two sons, of giving them what was called in those days a "classical education". How well she performed 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 driving a steer, I started out to get an education. I walked the entire distance of seventy-five miles to. Berea College where a few years later my brother Henry followed me. Entering the primary department, after thirteen 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 Theology 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 returned to his mountain home in eastern Kentucky where he became a prominent attorney, land-owner and influential 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 Washington, D. C., and Dunbar, Pa., graduated from Oberlin with an A. B. degree in 1893, with high honors, having worked her way through college 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 substantial background and began their young lives in an atmosphere of deep religious fervor, intellectual intensity and altruistic idealism. The dominant note in our home was Christian education, "classical" or "higher" education.

MUCH of the education of our children was done in the home. We felt that the mere imparting of knowledge, rule and formula, important as it was, was rather a minor part of training for life work, that the setting 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 literature. 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 anything else pluck, courage, determination, the never-give-up spirit? Remembering my own struggles I knew that it had been these elements that had carried me through, for in my thirteen years of struggle at Berea there was not a single day that I had not rather (Turn to page 60) 41

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The Bond Family (Continued from page 41) havedied than to have given up, gone back to my people and confessed that I could not make it, that I had failed. Mrs. Bond, a born teacher, a fine Greek, Latin and French scholar, has taught most of her married life, adding considerable to our monthly stipend and at the same time carried more than her share of church and community work, holding up my hands and cheering me on when I hesitate or faltered.

Gilbert and James, the two eldest boys, received college instruction at Talledega and Atlanta Universities and have made creditable records, each having done his bit for Uncle Sam in the Great War. Thomas, now professor of science in Simmons University and Y.M.C.A secretary, is a B.S. from Langston University, Oklahoma, and A.B. from Lincoln University, Pa. Maxwell, now Director of Physical Education in the Pittsburg Y/M/ C.A., completed his undergraduate work at Chicago "Y" College and in the University of Chicago with the degree of B.P.E. Horace now in the Graduate School of Education of the University of Chicago is an A.B. from Lincoln University, Pa., and A.M. from University of Chicago. He is on leave of absence from the C.A. & N. University of Oklahome where for two years he was head of the department of education. He has contributed articles to The Crisis, Opportunity, The South Atlantic Quarterly, School and Society, The Journal of Abnormal and Social Psychology, Harlow's Weekley and various other educational journals. Lucy, the youngest child, having finished her high school education in Central High School, Louisville, is now taking her college course in Oberlin accompanied by her mother who is pursuing post graduate work in history and sociology and reading French on the side.

The South Revisited (Continued from page 43) The last place at which I stopped was Jackson, Mississippi. While there, I called upon the wife of the president of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People's local branch. She apologized to [Illegible] I needed was to make my work acquisitive, to make money out of Negroes. Then, and then only, would my visits be approved by Chambers of Commerce and Rotary Clubs. My hostess, who was young, slender and active, talked of many things -- of the new high school for the colored, of the better streets where the weel-to-do colored people lived. She liked her city very much. After a little, Henry, her boy of twelve came in, fine-looking youngster. When he had gone out to play, we began discussing the subject of whether or not it were best for him to grow up in the South.

"MISSISSIPPI is my state," his mother said, "and I don't want to leave it, but sometimes I get worrying. I can't forget what happened when Henry was a small boy, not more than six. We were out walking together and we passed a little white girl was was eating an ice cream cone. My boy stopped and stared after her, his mouth watering. A white man, loafing on the sidewalk, turned and said to me: 'You'd better look after that boy of yours. He needs a noose around his neck.'"

I gave an exclamation of horror. She went on very quietly. "It was a good while ago, but I can't forget. I wake up in the night, sometimes, trembling. It isn't as if I didn't know how little it takes to arouse the whites. I had an uncle who was lynched. He was a good man, a preacher and respected. But he got into words about a debt that a white man was trying to collect from him. He didn't believe the debt was just and he answered back and said just what he thought. They shot him to death. That wasn't so very long ago. So you can see sometimes I'm worried. I don't bring my boy up to hate the whites. I don't want to preach hatred to anyone, but I bring him up to avoid them."

The husband had come in and gave his opinion.

"I've wanted to go North and set - tle in Detroit, " he declared, "since I read a catalogue of Michigan University two summers ago. I'd like my boy to go to college there."

Will this Negro family, one of the most progressive and interesting that Mississippi is likely to produce, go {Illegible}

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