Black Scholar - by Wayne J Urban (Paperback)

About the Book

Urban chronicles the distinguished life and career of the historian, teacher, and university administrator Horace Mann Bond. Urban illuminates not only the man and his accomplishments but also the many issues that confronted him and his colleagues in black education during the middle decades of the twentieth century.

Book Synopsis

In Black Scholar, Wayne J. Urban chronicles the distinguished life and career of the historian, teacher, and university administrator Horace Mann Bond. Urban illuminates not only the man and his accomplishments but also the many issues that confronted him and his colleagues in black education during the middle decades of the twentieth century. After covering the major events of Bond's youth, Urban follows him from his student years at Lincoln University and the University of Chicago through his work for the Julius Rosenwald Fund to his subsequent administrative leadership at several black institutions, including Fort Valley State College, Lincoln University, and Atlanta University.

Among the many details Urban discusses are Bond's prodigious early output of scholarly books and articles, his enduring concern about the biases of intelligence testing, his work on preparing the NAACP's court brief for the Brown v. Board of Educationi case, and his career-long interest in what he felt were the affinities between modern-day Africans and African Americans--the one struggling to break free from colonialism, the other from segregation.

Review Quotes

Does a solid job of tracing Bond's career and, equally important, of placing Bond in the larger context of struggle that gripped black scholars and leaders of his generation-the struggle between protest and accommodation.

--Choice

In telling Bond's story, Wayne Urban illuminates the challenges faced by African-American scholars early in the twentieth century.

--Harvard Educational Review

Provides a balanced view in illuminating not only Bond's strengths but also his weaknesses.

--Journal of American History

Provides a helpful case study of the racial restrictions and heavy burdens placed on twentieth-century African American leaders.

--History of Education Quarterly

The portrait of Bond that Urban paints is of an individual who yearned for the career of a scholar and teacher but who seemed driven to assume administrative positions that were neither personally nor professionally satisfying. . . . Urban provides an account that any academic contemplating an administrative career would be well-advised to read and ponder. . . . A well-written and thoroughly researched book.

--American Journal of Education

Those scholars interested in understanding the racial and political forces active within black higher education before the Civil Rights Act of 1964 would do well to begin their research by reading Urban's work.

--Georgia Historical Quarterly

About the Author

WAYNE J. URBAN is Associate Director of the Education Policy Center and Professor of Education at the University of Alabama. His other books include Accountability in American Education; Why Teachers Organized; Gender, Race and the National Education Association: Professionalism and Its Limitations; and American Education: A History.