>>First of all I would like to welcome you. My name is Jay Schafer, I'm the Director of Libraries here at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.
And I would like to thank you all for attending today's program, "Growing Up Bond."
As you can tell we are video taping this presentation
So it will be available because it's an important event for us.
In fact it's a historic and miraculous event I would like to say.
It's historic because we have the three children of Horace Mann Bond with us
to help celebrate the digitization of Dr. Bond's papers.
And it's miraculous because we actually do have all three of Horace Mann Bond's children with us today
in spite of storm Pax, as the weather channel is calling it.
I'm not sure that when people say 'peace be with you'
they exactly meant this kind of storm
but, uh, we all got here in spite of the travel logistics that were in the way.
So first it's my pleasure to introduce the Chancellor of the University of Massachusetts Amherst,
Kumble Subbaswamy who will offer some welcoming remarks.
Chancellor?
[Applause]
>>Good afternoon.
It's my honor and pleasure to welcome all of you to this historic event.
As a scholar, educator, and advocate for civil rights, Horace Mann Bond was a key figure
in the growth of historically black colleges and universities during the decades surrounding Brown v. Board of Education.
Bond's remarkable collection of personal papers, is rich in his correspondence
with the leading African American intellectuals and figures in the emerging world of independent Africa.
Today as the flagship campus of the Commonwealth, the University of Massachusetts Amherst
proudly celebrates the digitization, preservation, and dissemination of the Horace Mann Bond papers.
This achievement reflects a decade-long, collaborative effort among the Bond family members,
the W.E.B. Du Bois department of African American Studies, and the W.E.B. Du Bois library and others.
Having the Bond family name forever associated with the University of Massachusetts Amherst brings great honor to our campus
for this collection adds significantly to our stature as a center for the research of African American history.
The Bond papers intersect with other important UMass Amherst collections which collectively
will enlighten research related to the movement for racial equality, especially in education.
By preserving the collection alongside related materials, the university recognizes the inter-connectedness
of a broad range of issues in social justice, allowing future generations of researchers, both scholars and students,
to study overlapping social and political movements.
In this way the Bond papers help us examine the larger histories of social change and engagement.
The successful completion of the project advances the strong reputation of the university
and showcases the library's skill at attracting and preserving unique materials, ensuring they are available to the community at large.
On behalf of the extended campus community, I thank the Bond family
for the generosity of both their time and for the legacy of their father's scholarship,
and thank you again for all of you for being here for this occasion.
[Applause]
>>Thank you Chancellor Swamy.
In the fall of 2012 the library's department of Special Collections and University Archives, commonly known as SCUA,
embarked on a project to digitize the complete papers of Horace Mann Bond as the Chancellor mentioned,
and to make them available through our digital repository named Credo.
Thanks to generous funding from the National Historic Publications and Records Commission,
and the equally generous support of the Bond family,
SCUA has scanned approximately 97 thousand individual pages, and 550 photographs.
The papers add to our expanding collections having to do with African American history
and culture and the history of race and ethnicity in America,
with particular emphasis on the struggle for racial equality and social justice.
The Horace Mann Bond papers are situated in a broader category of collections
that we call the Archive of Social Change.
The Archive of Social Change emphasizes the cross-fertilization between several
social movements and centers of activist energy, including peace, social and racial justice, agricultural reform,
environmentalism, sustainability, labor activism, gay activism, anti-nuclear activism, and intentional communities,
they're branching out now into anti-fluoridation activism, campaigns for voter right and clean elections, and community and charitable organizations.
Today's celebration of the digitization of the Horace Mann Bond papers is another important step in making
the Archive of Social Change available to anyone with an internet connection from anywhere in the world at any time of the day.
Since most of you came to hear the panelists talk and not me, let's move on to the panel.
To moderate the panel we have two distinguished members of the W.E.B. Du Bois department of African American history.
Professor John Bracey Jr. has taught in the Du Bois department since 1972 and is currently chair of the department.
His scholarship includes editorial work on the film series "Black Studies Research Sources" which includes the papers
of the NAACP, Asa Phillip Randolph, Mary McLeod Bethune, and Horace Mann Bond.
Professor Bracey will provide us with a brief background of the Bond papers and how they came to the UMass Amherst libraries.
Also, Amilcar Shabazz, a professor in the Du Bois department of African American studies,
and he, Amilcar was the seventh chair of the department.
In 2003, Dr. Shabaaz accepted an appointment as Faculty Advisor to the Chancellor for Diversity and Excellence.
Dr., Professor Shabaaz will introduce the Bond family members and help us move into a discussion of Growing Up Bond.
So Professor Bracey.
[Applause]
>>Good Afternoon.
>>Good Afternoon.
[Louder] >>Good Afternoon.
[Audience] >>Good Afternoon.
>>Good, good.
This is a hard one, they gave me ten minutes and you know I can talk ten minutes before I get to the topic.
So I'm gonna keep it short.
The simple version is, when Meyer Weinberg came to the university in 1979
he initiated discussions with Mrs. Julia Washington Bond which resulted in the papers being lodged in the UMass library.
When Meyer moved from the Ed School to the 22nd floor of the library, he named his space the Horace Mann Bond Center.
We then began the process of trying to, Meyer and I, trying to figure out how to get Bond more widely known.
We worked with Kathy Emerson, Katherine Emerson to get the papers processed, this took place in 1980 and 1981.
And in 1989 I got the microfilm company I worked for, University Publications of America,
to do a microfilm edition of the Horace Mann Bond papers and the "Black Studies Research Sources" that Meyer and I were editing.
And now we have a digital version of the papers.
Now that's the easy part. The hard part is why Horace Mann Bond? Why is he all that important?
In 2004, I gave a hour long lecture on the relationship between Horace Mann Bond and W.E.B. Du Bois
Right, on that relationship alone. So I mean Bond clearly can't be captured in a short presentation.
So I'm gonna sketch out why Horace Mann Bond is so important and why he's vital to the development of black studies in this country,
and understanding the country, to study the life and writings of a person like Horace Mann Bond.
Well it's important in a number of ways and a lot of ways the papers coming here was way, way over determined
because the connections were so multifarious and manifest that it was kind of hard not to have Bond's papers come here.
First it was Meyer Weinberg and the Chicago connection.
Weinberg came out of the left in Chicago, was active in the struggle for schools.
I met him back in the 1960s doing the sit-ins. He formed a journal called "Integrative Education," on the board of that journal was Horace Mann Bond.
But also John Hope Franklin and August Meier, and Horace Mann Bond stayed on that journal as, you know, an editorial board
until 1972 when he passed on.
When Meyer came to UMass he brought "Integrated Education" with him. So that's how that journal got here.
The minute he got here, I didn't know him personally in Chicago, I only knew him by telephone calls,
we got together and said okay what can we do to kind of yeast up Horace Mann Bond.
I had already known about Bond from my years at Roosevelt, from the African connection.
The people that told me about him most was St. Clair Drake and Lorenzo Turner,
they were all in AMSAC together, American Society for African Culture.
Horace Mann Bond had been in the first conference of African writers, the second conference of African writers.
You know he was an integral part of the Pan-African movement, you know,
he's on a platform in Paris with Leopold Senghor, Alioune Diop, Chiek Anta Diop, Frantz Fanon, Aimé Césaire
you know, right in the middle of that, you know, giving his word. You know he died in the world Pan-Africanists, people don't appreciate the importance of that.
When he was at Lincoln he trained Kwame Nkrumah and Nnamdi Azikiwe, leading figures in the anti-colonial movement.
Also when I was at Roosevelt when we had Augie Meier, Augie was doing a reprint series of classical works in black scholarships,
and one of the first books we proposed was Horace Mann Bond, Negro Education in Alabama.
Right, so that's in Augie's series. We were trying to get, you know, we always knew that this should be out there,
and it should be out there in a very important way. And in my view, and I've wrote about this elsewhere,
next to Du Bois's Black Reconstruction, the one book you need to read that would explain to you the relationship of education to the social structure of this country
is Negro Education in Alabama. There's nothing better, you know, there still is nothing better.
There's a lot of prolifics out there, but for a serious scholarly study, you know socio-economically based,
grounded in the sources, you know careful, sophisticated, brilliant scholarship, Negro Education in Alabama is what you ought to go read.
You know, that's your homework assignment when you leave here.
I also had a personal connection to Bond, you know, and this is the part I really kind of like.
Horace Mann Bond was the president of Lincoln from 1945 to 1957, when I was growing up on the campus of Howard University at Washington DC.
Now if you know that well, everybody knows that the most important event in that year was the Howard/Lincoln football game.
[Laughing]
Right, and so I know that at least once or twice Horace Mann Bond must have led the Bond family down to DC
so that the Howard Bisons got stomped by Lincoln what ever they were in football.
Alright, the other relationship is on the Journal of Negro Education.
The Journal of Negro Education was housed in the School of Education at Howard, and Horace Mann Bond was on the editorial advisory board.
That meant he came down at least once a year to meet on the second floor of Douglas Hall.
And I remember as a kid, you know, looking out in the hallway when the college presidents would be walking the halls,
it's a very impressive group of black men in grey suits and ties and cigars and all,
who were leaders in black education, you know, Shrugs and H. Councill Trenholm, and people like that.
Martin Jenkins from Oregon State, you know amazing, Benny Mays from Morehouse College, an amazing bunch of intellectuals,
who also are going up and Horace Mann Bond was one of those, one of those people.
The other thing when I began to read the journal was that Horace Mann Bond began to write at a very early age.
You know, the connection in terms of Chicago goes back again to my personal encounter. My mother was born the same year as Horace Mann Bond, 1904.
They both went to college when they were 15, they both graduated when they were 19.
My mother began to teach right away when she was 19, and so she taught two years,
so when she got to Chicago on a Rosenwald fellowship in 1929 Horace Mann Bond was there doing a doctoral program.
So she was doing her master's and he had already jumped her by two years.
She got a job in 1932 at Howard University.
Right, when she go there she was immediately put to work on the editorial board of the Journal of Negro Education.
The first issue, and it's still the issue I love the most, the first issue in the Journal of Negro Education,
volume one, number one, 1932, has articles by Horace Mann Bond, W.E.B. Du Bois, and in the back, in the book reviews,
book reviews by Helen Carston Harris, that's my mother, before I was, when she was married.
She stays on the board throughout so anytime I would check the masthead I would look at the contributing staff, the editorial staff,
you know that's my mom's and down to the editorial advisors, Horace Mann Bond.
When you read that journal Bond early on took on everybody.
He goes after Carter G. Woodson's The Mis-Education of the Negro big time.
Calls it wool gathering, silly, foolish, and not ever had been published, wasn't worthy of being a book,
you know, and he didn't care.
Right, he didn't care who Carter G. Woodson was. Woodson of course got him back
when he came with you know Negro Education in the American Social Order.
You know, and that came out in 1939 Woodson went after him and said
this is not a book, this is silly, unscientific claptrap, but they signed a truce.
You know, because Negro Education in Alabama was published by Carter G. Woodson's press, Associated Publishers.
You know, and they got along fine after that. Same relationship with Dr. Du Bois.
Horace Mann Bond jumped all over Black Reconstruction, Du Bois didn't know anything about Marxism,
what is this kinda [inaudible] scholarship, you need to study some socialism, blah, blah, blah.
Du Bois got back at him, right, with a review of Negro Education in Alabama, saying this is a great book
except you didn't understand anything about the socio-economic realities of black life in the relationship to the larger will.
They obviously called a truce because they stayed together as comrades and colleagues for the rest of their lives.
Right, Horace Mann Bond is like twenty-something years old,
twenty-something years old. This is not an old age, this is a young guy taking on the giants in the field, fearlessly.
Fearlessly, an amazing, absolutely amazing person.
The two things that I want to close up with cause ten minutes is not a long time,
there are two pieces of writing that impressed me most in going back and reading Bond's, you know, huge body of work.
One is a piece he wrote in 1928, again he is twenty-four years old, he's writing in the annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science.
He's in there with Alain Locke, Du Bois, Charles Johnson, E. Franklin Frazier, Leo Frobinius, Walter White, Eugene Kinckle Jones,
I mean this is the elite in studying race relations in this country, he's twenty-four years old, right up there with them.
Right behind Robert Park and E. Franklin Frazier and Du Bois.
It's amazing you know, quality of scholarship.
That in and of itself is impressive but also in 1928
he was invited, when he was in Georgia, uh Alabama, in Montgomery, to go attend an execution.
Right, he knew a minister, and this minister was a witness to executions and he said I want you to come with me.
Right, and he goes and he watches two people being killed in the electric chair,
and he writes about that but he didn't publish it until 1940, and he publishes it in Phylon, Du Bois's journal
when Du Bois was back in Atlanta.
It's called "Faith in the Death-Chamber," it's one of the most amazing pieces of writing you are ever gonna read.
You know, it makes your hair stand on end, you know, as he describes, you know, these two people dying.
You know, being murdered by the state.
You know, and the courage that this black man has in the face of his imminent death and the process of being strapped into the electric chair.
And so it's one of the most amazing pieces of writing I've ever, ever seen.
You know, and it's a courageous piece of writing and so the University of Massachusetts ought to be honored,
you know, privileged, you know, to have the papers of Horace Mann Bond here.
You know, it brings credit to the university and Meyer and I always talked about,
we got Du Bois already her we got to get Horace Mann Bond because they belong together.
And finally, finally, finally we got them both here, we got them both on microfilm, we got them both digitized.
So when you finish reading Negro Education in Alabama go up there and read, you know, some kind of version of the Horace Mann Bond papers.
You will be informed and enlightened.
Thank you very much.
[Applause]
>>Growing Up Bond.
I am extraordinarily excited and honored to have the privilege of introducing the members of this panel discussion
and in whatever way I can to facilitate this afternoon's conversation about an extraordinary family,
and a particular member of that family who has been a guide and hero of mine for a very long time,
Dr. Horace Mann Bond.
How to begin this is a problem that has perplexed me for many months now.
Thankfully to John we got some introduction to Dr. Horace Mann Bond, I'm sure more will come out as we go along here.
But let me speak to the three of his children that are here and uh, before they begin to tell us about their father and mother,
and what it was like to be loved and raised by them, which is their purpose for being here with us.
Civil rights attorney and law professor, Jane Bond Moore was born Jane Marguerite Bond in 1938,
in Nashville, Tennessee.
As a child Moore met Paul Robeson,  Kwame Nkrumah,  Philippa Duke Schuyler, and many others.
She attended Fort Valley Demonstration School, School at Ms. Foster's House,
Village School at Lincoln University, Cambridge School is western Massachusetts,
and graduated from Wilmington, Delaware's Friends high school in 1955.
After first attending the 
University of Pennsylvania and Lincoln University,
Moore graduated from Spelman College in 1959 with her B.S. in Psychology.
She worked for the Southern Regional Council and later volunteered
in the Atlanta offices of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee or SNCC.
and worked with James Forman, Ruby Doris Smith and her brother, Julian bond,
helping with his successful 1966 campaign for a seat in the Georgia State Legislature.
In 1971, she relocated to Berkeley, California with her husband Howard Moore Jr.,
and Jane began, uh, then graduated with her J.D. degree from Boalt Hall at the University of California in 1975.
And began practicing law in 1980.
She worked with the Oakland Unified School District representing clients in public school discipline cases
and public employees in both discrimination and disciplinary matters.
Before she began working as a law partner with her husband in 2001.
In addition Moore taught employment law and civil rights law at John F. Kennedy University Law School
and among other universities.
Moore is a mother of three grown children; Grace, Constance, and Kojo.
Civil rights activist and politician Julian Bond was born in 1940 in Nashville, Tennessee.
He and his family moved to Pennsylvania where his father, Horace Mann Bond was appointed president of Lincoln University.
In 1957, Julian Bond graduated from the George School, a Quaker school in Pennsylvania,
and entered Moore House College.
In 1960, Julian Bond was one of several hundred students who helped form the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee.
In 1965, Julian Bond was elected to the Georgia's House of Representatives.
He was barred from taking his seat in the House because of his outspoken statements against the Vietnam War.
In December 1966, the Supreme Court ruled in his favor and he served four terms as Representative
and six terms in the Georgia Senate from 1975 to 1986.
President, um.
During the 1968 Presidential Election, Julian Bond was the first African American to be nominated for Vice President of the United States.
He withdrew his name from the ballot however, because he was too young to serve.
Later, Julian Bond was the host of America's Black Forum, he also hosted Saturday Night Live on April 9, 1977.
Becoming the first black political figure to host the show.
In 1978, he played himself in the mini series, "King."
In 1987, Bond narrated the critically acclaimed 1987 PBS series, "Eyes on the Prize,"
that we have our own William Strickland right up here as a part of the consultant team that produced that series.
He also had a small appearance in the movie "Ray" in 2004,
and Julian Bond served eleven terms as Chairman of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People
National Board, from 1998 to 2010.
Time Magazine named Julian Bond one of America's top 200 leaders.
He is the recipient of the Civil Liberties Bill of Rights Award of Georgia and Massachusetts,
The NAACP Spingarn Medal in 2009 and the National Freedom Award,
as well as he holds 25 honorary degrees from many leading colleges and universities.
The author of numerous books, he is a distinguished professor in the Department of Government at American University in Washington DC,
and an Emeritus faculty member in the History Department at the University of Virginia.
James Bond, the other one,
[Audience Chuckling]
was born in Fort Valley, Georgia in 1944.
He served as Assistant Director of Communications for the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee in the early 1960s.
On March 22, 1966, he joined six other SNCC workers, John Lewis, James Forman, Cleveland Sellers,
Willie Ricks, Judy Richardson, and William Hall in protesting and being arrested at the South African Consulate in New York,
preceding by 20 years, the Free South Africa movement that later saw hundreds arrested at South African embassies in Washington DC.
He became a resident of the city of Atlanta in 1954 and has long been active in the city's civic and community affairs.
He was on the advisory board of the Atlanta Legal Aid Society
and is a former Southeastern Directory of the Youth Citizenship Fund.
He was a Voter Education Project Fellow that same year that he managed the Georgia Senate Campaign of his brother Julian.
He then served as chairman of the Labor Education Advancement Program's Advisory Committee
to the Atlanta Urban League.
Bond served as a member of the Atlanta City Council from 1973 through 1981
and has played a leading role in the development of cable television for the city of Atlanta.
Bond represented Cable Atlanta's public access programming at the National Video Festival
at the John F. Kennedy Center for Performing Arts
presented by the American Film Institute in 1981.
He also co-founded the American Music Show which won the first Cable Award for Excellence in Cable Casting in Atlanta.
I would like to open things up with, in a personal way and then to get out of the way
and let each of them share some things that I feel we will discover have great import for us
in these days of headlines about our education crisis, the neoliberal destruction of our public school system,
class struggle, late capitalism in the death of the intelligentsia, the racial achievement gap,
the new Jim Crow in the school to prison pipeline, and so on.
So here is my story.
In November of 1997 the Southern Historical Association held its annual meeting in Atlanta, Georgia.
That same year I had begun a first semester of a tenure track appointment in American Studies
at the University of Alabama in Tuscaloosa.
That same year The Star Creek Papers
The Star Creek Papers were published and Adam Fairclough was the editor.
Some six years before I had met Mary Ellen Curtin who later married Adam,
and so either she or Adam invited me to come to a reception that was being held to celebrate the publication of The Star Creek Papers.
The event was away from the conference site at a private home in an Atlanta suburb
but since I had driven from Tuscaloosa it was no problem for me to get to the reception and I was eager to go.
It was there that I met the Bond family members for the first time.
It is more accurate to say that I was a little fly on the wall but for me it was a wonderful and memorial, memorable evening.
Fairclough was pretty laid back but what came through was that Horace and Julia Bond
were not only husband and wife and parents, but intellectual partners and political comrades.
Those are my words.
Here are better ones from Julian Bond's Foreword to The Star Creek Papers.
"Hanging on the wall of my study are a framed photograph and hand-made certificate, both fifty-five years old.
In the picture three men in academic regalia stand behind two young children;
the accompanying, fading testimonial, neatly typed, announces to
"ALL MEN BY THESE PRESENTS" the consecration of the children to “the high and noble estate of the scholar."
The children are my sister, Jane Marguerite, then three, and myself, aged two.
The three men are W. E. B. Du Bois, E. Franklin Frazier, my father, Horace Mann Bond.
It is arguable whether the long-ago blessing had any real effect on
my current status as university professor, or my sister's profession as a lawyer,
but the three dedicators represented the pinnacle of scholarship about black Americans then."
I end with this, he writes, "The document on my wall, now yellowed with age,
serves as testimony to my father's dedication to unfettered and fearless inquiry."
John Bracey used that same word, "unfettered and fearless inquiry."
"'The estate of the scholar is an ancient and honorable one.' Horace Mann Bond wrote a half century ago.
'Known of olden times and in each generation even in the times of distress and human misery and wretchedness,
a refuge and a haven for the souls of men.'"
Horace Mann Bond valued a life of scholarship for his children as much as for himself.
He knew from both his heritage and his examination of history that the story of black southerners, was also the story of southern whites.
The relationship's amicable and hostile, between these people was and is the story of the United States.
Let us begin with a warm Minuteman and Minutewoman welcome to the Bond family
at this time.
[Applause]
And I leave it to either one of them to start things off.
>>I don't mind starting, starting first.
I ought to say, I want to say for my sister and brother that we're happy and grateful
to the University for harboring and now for digitizing our father's papers.
We are honored to be here, and we're honored that the University of Massachusetts feels as strongly as they do about our father's work.
And we're happy to be here as well.
And I want to say to the younger people here who may not know, Saturday Night Live used to be a comedy show.
[Laughing]
And to all of you here that "Ray" is not the last movie I made,
5 to 7 my wife and I, who, she's seated over there appear in a new movie, about to come out, called "5 to 7."
5 to 7 are the hours French, sophisticated French people set aside to have affairs.
And we appear in this movie, it will be in your theater sometime soon.
[Laughing]
But I wanted to say something about growing up at Lincoln University.
A young woman, like the three of us, a university, a Lincoln University Faculty brat,
is writing a memoir of her life at Lincoln.
She reported to me that all of her school mates from Lincoln and others were interview subjects for her,
and all of them report their Lincoln years were trying, the years were harsh and ugly,
all but one, and that was me.
For me, and for me alone, they were the happiest, funniest, best years of my life.
And what accounts for this disparity between my own recollections of what living at Lincoln was like,
and it wasn't as bad as she said, but why I look down on those years
and why the others looked up I'm not really sure, but that's the way it happened.
My years at Lincoln were happy and you know,
to be able to live in a place where you had access to the gymnasium,
so it meant you had your own basketball court, we didn't have a swimming pool,
you had your own football court, you had your own tennis courts,
you had all of these athletic places, and it appeared as though they were just for you.
They weren't of course, but that's what you thought, or I thought anyway.
And it was a lovely, lovely time for me, and I can't understand why this young author
who says I thought about Lincoln so poorly and the time there so poorly,
while all of my other friends though of it so, such a terrible, terrible place.
Maybe my brother and sister can do that too.
But I'm happy to say that I,
when John Bracey talked about my father's prison article, uh,
this is an experience he had Kilby Prison in Alabama,
witnessing the execution of these two men, and I think it committed me to being
against capital punishment for all of my life, it's such a stark, stark understanding of what it means to take another person's life
and to watch it and to see,
of these two men who were killed, one of them was a man who had been charged with killing a Birmingham policeman,
and as a consequence many Birmingham policemen came to see him get his just reward,
and they were horrified by the execution themselves.
They vomited, they fainted, they couldn't take it,
and I think it got that same kind of ugly awareness, heightened that ugly awareness with me.
Uh, but I'll
concede to my brother and sister.
And see what they have to say.
>>Well on that subject, on the article my father wrote,
I remember uh, when I first met Morris Dees,
um, you may not know he's the founder of the Southern Poverty Law Center,
and a great, great, great person, he sited to me that article as the main reason that he founded the organization.
That that article, uh, had put him against the death penalty for life.
As it did me.
I'm the only child here that has grown up my whole life on a college campus,
black college campus, and now still live on a college campus, uh, Morehouse College.
Um, I was born on Fort Valley College campus, lived there until I was about two years old,
we then moved to Lincoln University in Pennsylvania, lived on that campus,
I did live for six years in New York City.
Um but then moved, when we moved from Lincoln to Atlanta we lived in faculty housing.
And then my parents built a private house um, but after a year or two, have been surrounded by Morehouse College.
There are no private residences in the neighborhood anymore.
And I love the experience.
It's just been great to, um, as Julian said, to have access to all this um,
to the library, to all the um, facilities for athletics,
um, and I've just loved the experience.
I also like Jane, attended the Cambridge School of Weston, in Weston, Massachusetts,
and that school also had a big effect on my life as my parents did.
It taught me, I like to use a line from a Bob Dylan song that says,
"You're better than no one and no one is better than you."
And I like to make that the philosophy of my life and I learned that at the Cambridge School.
Um and also from my parents.
It's also um,
incredible to live in a house where just all these things are available to you
as far as reading material, artwork, meeting other people,
and particularly black scholars.
So I've just as a result of being the child of Horace Mann Bond and Julia Bond,
have had a wonderful life.
And also must mention my mother.
You know, Emory University in Atlanta recently acquired my mother's papers,
but the best thing in the papers are love letters written by my father to her
when she was twenty years old and they were secretly married,
and he was traveling the country and um, they're just incredible.
And hopefully will be published some day.
I've just had a wonderful experience being the Bond, a Bond child.
[Julian]>>It's on you Jane. [Jane Laughing]
>>Well I too had a wonderful experience being a Bond child.
I, before I came here I looked through the "Negro Education in the South," one of my father's books,
and it was really remarkable, it was like having a conversation with him
because all of the points that he made in the book he talked about to us.
About the importance of social and economic background on education and educational achievement,
and how that you cannot, um, dismiss someone because of supposedly low educational achievement,
because it might be based upon their lack of preparation due to economics.
Um, I mean that sort of thing and it's true as Julian and James said that it was wonderful
to grow up in a house, at least now that I am looking back where everyone read,
people encouraged us to read, they expected us to read, they never told us not to read anything,
at least they never told me.
I read whatever, and I can even remember, especially at Lincoln that we would sit at dinner,
I don't know if you remember, we would sit at the dinner table and everyone had a book.
Even James, he was the baby.
You know he had a little golden book or whatever, and we would all sit there and read.
I mean, in some ways it was strange because we weren't talking to each other,
But we were reading at least. [Audience Laughing]
And living on college campuses was also wonderful.
It's true you had a lot of freedom, we could go everywhere, bike, do everything,
there were all these facilities.
When I was at Lincoln I remember I was standing outside the library,
which was a small library because it's a small college,
and the librarian was there and I said you know I'd like to read all those books in the library
and he said well you can, you know, it's not such a large collection.
You know everybody was so encouraging to us.
and as to Lincoln being, Julian being the only one of all of the children who grew up at Lincoln who loved it,
and the rest saw it as dark, I don't think that's quite true.
I think that he was younger than many of the people and didn't see some of the problems.
But there were some problems there.
One I'll just mention, there were about three or four suicides among the children who lived there,
so, which I don't think you can blame solely on their family relationships,
part of it had to do with the atmosphere in which we were growing up.
So um,
There were some problems there.
I mean whatever Julian may believe,
[Laughing]
but I think he was, [Laughing] he was too young.
And all, well.
And one of the, one of the things I have to say is that I remember that
influenced my attitude is that my father was the first black president of Lincoln
and then when we got there it turned out everyone else on the faculty thought they were going to be president too.
You know, the black people, professors thought they were going to be the first black president,
and the white professors thought they were going to be yet another white president.
And so there was quite a lot of criticism which people didn't seem to mind saying in front of me.
[Laughing]
I mean I heard a lot of it from these adults and so that did affect my opinion.
Including um,
the lady whose name will be nameless but who came and criticized,
who was a faculty wife, who criticized my parents for bringing a suit to integrate the local public schools
in the little town next to us.
Was one of the reasons my parents moved to Lincoln in addition to the, where my father went to college,
was they thought we could get a better public education in the north than in the south.
But when we got to Lincoln in Chester County, Pennsylvania the local school was segregated.
So my parents sued and of course they won right away because it was clearly illegal,
but this faculty wife, faculty wife came and told my mother that,
I think either I listened to it because I had this habit of kinda hiding behind couches and things [Laughing]
and listening to the grown-ups talk and
she told my mother that um, after all the people, mostly black,
in the village, the people in the village, it was a little town next to the college,
who worked at the college, mostly in menial jobs, all menial jobs,
at least the people from the village,
that they didn't make enough money and didn't pay enough tax so therefore  I suppose they were uh,
deserved to be segregated in her mind.
And um, my mother was a very mild mannered person,
and she didn't say anything but I remember feeling very angry as a kid
listening to her even though I didn't understand all of the aspects of her,
I could, I understand that she was being very critical of my parents.
But that aside Lincoln was an enjoyable,
[Laughing]
and a few other things aside, Lincoln was an enjoyable place.
I think Fort Valley holds the position in my life that Lincoln holds in Julian's
and that's because I was much younger and I am sure if I talked to
the people I know from Fort Valley who were older than me they would come up with some skeletons
and terrible things that happened that I would be horrified about.
But it was a wonderful thing to be the parents of Julia and uh, [Julian]>> The children.
>>Horace Bond. [Julian]>> The children.
>> Yeah, I've got a question for you. >>Oh the children. [Laughing]
>> Growing up on Howard's campus, one of the big advantages was
having these brilliant people help you with your homework.
[Laughing]>>Right.
So you, I walk into my mom's office, second floor Douglass Hall, and you'd have Sterling Brown correct your English paper for you,
or E. Franklin Frasier tell you that your statistics are wrong,
or John Hope Franklin said reconstruction really ended in 1877 not 1876.
So did you have, did you take advantage of that around as you were growing up and going to school?
>>Oh sure, um, Dr. Frankowsky,
who uh, was a mathematician I think, um helped me,
I've always been a terrible math student, and he helped me to a great deal.
Mrs. Hill, who lived next door to us, the wife of the Dean at Lincoln,
helped me with my homework so it was like having a, you know,
a series of helpers within walking distance, easy walking distance, who were there and eager to help you,
and willing to help you.
And so and I have a different view of what happened at the school,
at Lincoln there were two schools across the street from each other.
There was a white school and a black school, and these schools were segregated not by law,
>>He means high schools.
>>No. >>No, no. These were grade schools.
>>Elementary schools. >>These were grade schools.
And these schools were segregated not by law, but by tests.
Tests were given to the students, the black students failed the test, they went to the black school,
the white students passed the test, they went to the white school.
But one year, the two big, dumb sons of the local white political boss failed the test,
[Laughing]
and rather than send them to the black school they closed the black school,
and that was the year we got there, so I don't think this, this suit ever came to pass.
Our father filed it and then the city, the school system just caved in.
And closed the black school and we went to the white school.
That's my memory.
>>I won't argue. [Laughing]
[Laughing]
It was probably, involved both, yes.
I believe that.
>> Can you talk a little more about your uh, your mother, I was just struck in The Star Creek Papers how they really
were collaborators on a lot of things, um, during that time in the South,
is there some recollections on that relationship?
>>Well she was very, um, she was, I wanna say personally she was very shy and very quiet
but she was extremely smart and very well read and had quite decided political views that she would never,
she rarely expressed outside of the family, but she would talk to our father about them.
I know that whenever we would talk about certain areas,
especially about English or grammar or literature he would always say you have to ask your mother that,
she's the scholar in that area.
So he, uh, my father certainly realized that she had expertise in certain areas.
>>What is it, one of Horace Mann Bond's, one of his biographers describes him as um, you know not,
as a little awkward with the ladies and when you read it you wonder how did they ever even get together,
if she was shy as well?
>>Oh well, I know what my mother used, told me.
My father never said that but he was teaching at Fisk and she was a student there,
and uh, she said he was teaching a class that had formerly been taught by a professor that she was very fond of
and she liked, she thought he was an excellent teacher.
And she said that I will not take this class because this new person will be there and I know
he will not be as good a professor as whoever had taught before.
So she deliberately didn't take this class but eventually they met and um they never told,
they never told me any big details about their meeting but I know they met, they fell in love,
they got married secretly and um stayed married until, you know, for the rest of their lives.
And as far as I know, um,
this sounds strange but I don't really remember them having a quarrel.
>>No.
>> A bad quarrel, they never quarreled. >>No, never.
>>They never quarreled or shouted at each other, or my father never said,
I mean they seemed to get along very well, now maybe they hid it very, whatever differences they had from us very well but
I, I honestly believe that they had an excellent relationship.
They really had a good relationship, that they were, um,
intellectually as well as in other ways very compatible.
>>Yeah.
Will you talk about your father's sense of humor. If you read his papers he has this amazing dry wit
where he goes after people in this very subtle kind of way,
you know like the piece I gave you on the IQ test.
Was he like that as a father? I mean did he, you know, kind of crack jokes that you had to figure out what they meant kind of thing?
>>Yes. Yes and sometimes you couldn't figure it out.
You knew it was funny but why is this funny?
[Laughing]
>>Yeah he did and he, he was also a very,
persistent in telling us, he was really what um, I don't, what people call, or used to call a race man.
He just loved black people. He thought black people were wonderful, that we had overcome all,
every possible obstacle and we're still overcoming every possible obstacle people could put in our way,
and we still, you know, we still go on.
So he was constantly telling us about various black people and how they did things.
And then sometimes, and I don't think he did this in a racist way but just to bolster our income,
he would tell us about stupid things white people would do.
[Laughing]
Which was really easy if you lived in the South.
[Loud Laughing]
And he would always read through things from the newspapers to us and say
see you know he did blah blah.
So I suppose so, if people would try to justify segregation on the basis of black people being inferior in various ways,
well he was just pointing out to us I think that um, poor judgement and
lack of intelligence does not depend on race.
That's something I learned early.
>>Yeah he did keep it quiet. The piece I gave you uh,
he was a specialist with Martin-Jenkinson IQ tests,
and one of his life's works was tkaing apart the meaning of IQ tests.
And when the Davis Commission in 1956 was attacking desegregation because black people had a lower IQs,
he helped the NAACP out by taking the IQs of the Southern Congressman and their constituents. [Laughing]
Alright.
And one, I just think the whole thing is hilarious. I'll pass out copies.
He's got one paragraph where he says, "In terms of IQ test scores,
the typical senator or congressman who signed the Southern Manifesto may be described as
A) a man who's voting constituency is in the lower twenty percent of mental ability of American whites,
so far as the middle ability is given by Army IQ tests.
This constituency could be classified under the system used by the Davis Committee as 'dull,normal' or 'moron.'"
[Laughing]
Right, and he goes, he's in Alabama, he's in Atlanta doing this.
He's not in the safety of New York, he's writing this and it's put into the congressional testimony.
He goes after all these congressmen, the schools they went to, their own IQs and what not.
Uh he's an amazingly courageous person but he also, always had, backed it up with this strong kind of factual kind of thing.
You know, but again with his sense of humor, you know, you want to talk the IQ test let me give you the IQ test.
>>If you want to see him, if you go on the internet and look for a Dr. Horace Mann Bond and Dr. Rufus Clement,
Rufus Clement was the President of Atlanta University and my father the President of Lincoln University,
and the two of them are on a TV show in Philadelphia,
talking about what effect the fifty-fourth Supreme Court decision will have on their schools.
Will this be good news for Atlanta University which is an all black school,
was this good news for Lincoln University an all black school,
will it be bad news for them?
And these two men, um, it's just amazing how they discuss this,
in ways that make you think they're saying what a stupid question this guy is asking.
But I've got to answer it and I've got to, you know I'm a college president after all,
I've got to hold up some face.
Uh, but just wonderful to see them and you'll see both these men and both of them relatively bright,
tremendously bright, uh, just look them up on the internet and you can see our father and Dr. Clement
parry with this guy. The guy's not a racist, he's not an ignoramus,
but uh they're getting the better of him every time they open their mouths.
>> And the internet is wonderful, you know, result of this digitizing the papers I now have an app on my phone,
where I can access any of my father's papers.
At a moment's notice, so that's just a wonderful thing.
And as far as his being shy, in his letters with my mother he's not shy to the least bit.
[Laughing]
And they're also very humorous and very showing.
One big remembrance I have of my father is that he took me to, from Lincoln when I was about eleven years old,
to a basketball game in Philadelphia to see the Warriors versus the Boston Celtics,
so it's Bill Russell versus Wilt Chamberlain.
>>The Warriors were playing in Philadelphia at the time. >>Right.
>>The Philadelphia Warriors not the Golden State Warriors. [Laughing]
>>But the thing that happened that I remember about that game is um,
right before half time Bill Sharman, it was Bill Sharman and Bob Cousy were the uh,
the guards at the time. Bill Sharman threw a pass the full length of the court um, that accidentally went into the basket.
And actually I saw that, last year on an ESPN sports show,
where they showed a reproduction of it, so you know it's just a wonderful memory.
But he took us to lots of sporting events like that.
>>Talking about this, these two became great sporting fans, I don't remember him ever taking me to a sports event.
[Laughing]
And I couldn't care less.
[Laughing]
>>You were into those other sports like soccer and swimming, instead of baseball or football.
[Laughing]
>>What are you trying to say.
[Laughing]
>>But you didn't come to the Howard Lincoln games? How many times
[Jane]>>Yes we went to the Howard Lincoln Games. >>Oh yes I went to the Howard Lincoln games,
I went to those, they were a lot of fun.
They were a lot of fun, you know bands and so on. [Jane]>>Yeah. [Bracey]>>Yeah, yeah.
[Bracey]>>More fur coats than you'll ever see in your life. >>Yes indeed.
>>And he took me to meet Jackie Robinson once.
I think he was talking at a United Negro College Fund uh,
event in Philadelphia and I went with him.
I don't know, I think I was home on vacation from high school,
I can't imagine but yeah, that was exciting meeting Jackie Robinson.
>>You said, Jane I think, that the beauty of living on one of these college campuses
is that not only were they a who's who of black America on the faculty,
but the kind of people who visited them, you can look at old papers from Lincoln
and they're having Miles Davis' band playing for a dance, can you imagine that?
[Laughing]
Dancing to Miles Davis.
I mean just this enormous sea of talent coming to where you are.
And you get to see these people and meet these people, and my parents would have parties for these people.
We have a picture of Jane and myself and Sylvia Hill, who was our next door neighbor,
standing next to Paul Robeson and he's singing the great Russian folk song,
"The Foreign Sergeant Generals," I'm standing next to him and I can feel his chest throbbing
[Buzzing] Sounded like that.
Just an enormous feeling, I'm standing next to this guy.
I wasn't really sure who he was, but I knew he was somebody important and I'm right there with him. [Laughing]
>>I remember Dad, he gave an honorary degree to Albert Einstein and had him come to the college.
>>Yes, now- >>And didn't he teach a course?
>>I don't remember this but
my parents told me that Albert Einstein told me, [James]>>I have a picture of him with you, Albert Einstein.
>>never remember anything that's already written down.
[Laughing]
And I've followed that my whole life.
[Laughing and clapping]
>>Also he had a tremendous connection to Africa. >>Yes.
>>And made many trips to Africa but had many African leaders come to the house.
And actually students at Lincoln became African leaders. A lot.
>>One of the dissertations written in the Du Bois department was on
Howard University's first African American president, Mordecai Johnson.
We hoped and expected that soon we will have other kinds of studies like this,
perhaps even on the work of your father as a leader of a college institution.
What kinds of things would you think would, that students here today could mine from something like this collection
in terms of thinking about some of the challenges we have in education today?
>>I think you would, today's student would discover that some of these problems that seem to afflict
American education today, are not new problems.
They're old problems.
And they've just not be solved or not been treated as strict, as strongly as they could have.
And they are the very same problems that yesterday's generation and the generation before that were dealing with.
And they may have made some advances on it but not sufficiently enough
and so we're leaving it up to this generation to do what previous generations didn't do.
You've got to solve these problems because we have obviously not been able to do so.
>>But here's some amazing insight on curriculum questions,
the whole, you know, the debate he has with Du Bois about the necessity of separate schools that they have in 1935
when the NAACP starts to move to get Plessy overturned,
he thinks very carefully about the environment in which young people learn.
I mean that's what he really was in to.
With the kind of curriculum you need, what the kind of nurturing you need,
as part of the school system. So you can't just throw people into a room and expect them to learn.
You have to have all kinds of stuff around it.
And if you read his stuff, he has very modern kinds of views on education,
there's not a lot that has been added on to what he's said, you know, writing about 1930 to 1950 or so,
because he though very carefully about this.
He's on both sides of the Brown decision, he's part of the group when they set up Texas Southern,
he sides with Carter Wesley to open up Texas Southern you know, against Marshall.
Marshall is saying this is going to undermine the case against Plessy and is saying look these kids need a school right now,
integration is there somewhere but they're gonna give us a school right now and we're gonna take it.
You know, because my uncle O'Hara Lanier was the first president of Texas Southern.
And what do you do, you know, you've got a choice of do you wait for integration in the future or do you take the school and hold on to it.
And Mordecai said, you know, a long time ago that people still use,
that you have to hold a black school as if it's going to last forever but work just as hard to destroy it.
You know, and you've got to do both simultaneously.
You've got to build it like it's gonna last forever but you want a world where you don't need a black school.
He said you've gotta do both when you get up in the morning everyday.
And that's the challenge of a black educator and I think your father's work does that.
It parallels those two kind of things.
If you read his stuff when he's at Fort Valley, he's trying to make that the best possible school ever.
He's not talking about abolishing it, he's talking about building it up.
But in the long run you might not need Fort Valley, you know.
So he's pushing both of those kinds of agendas simultaneously.
And that's the difficulty of being a black college president, you know,
it's not an easy task.
>>Yeah.
>>Jay, I don't know if in respect of time and whether I can take a mic out,
you tell me what, if there's anything from the floor.
I see Bill Strickland looking rather uh, >>Pensive. >>pensive as uh, [Laughing]
[Bracey]>>Pensive or taking a nap.
>>Anthony.
[Mic muffling and inaudible talking]
>>Hi, afternoon. My name is Anthony Phillips. I am a second year student in the W.E.B. Du Bois Department of African American studies.
Um, in the PhD. program.
One I just want to say this has been very enlightening to hear you all talk about your father
and the work that he's done and also Professor Bracey and his presentation so I thank you for that.
And also, I just wanted to say, you know, I went to Morehouse for a year, enjoyable experience,
and so I can understand why James Bond, you enjoyed your time at the House so, it's wonderful.
Um but, [Bracey]>>Talk into the mic.
>>I wanted, oh, I just wanted to ask a question because one of, you started off talking about Lincoln University
which is one of the fine, you know, historically black colleges and universities in the nation
um, a lot of great historical things have taken place at that particular university between Kwame Nkrumah and your father as well, and so many other folks.
I just wanted to know because I just texted one of my friends telling him that I was at the Julian Bond, the uh Horace Mann Bond lecture,
um at our university and I said that, I said that you know Julian Bond and his family and his brother and sister are here
but he said he's like Julian Bond has never really visited out campus that much which I don't know if it's true
but to hear that you said earlier on that you did not necessarily like Lincoln
so I wanted to know what was your relationship at the time with Lincoln University
>>With Lincoln, >>yeah, growing up?
>>Um, well I got into a big fight with Lincoln over the Barnes Foundation. Do you know this story?
>>No that's why I wanted to know it.
>>There are a lot of Barnes papers in this collection.
>>Yeah.
>>Albert Barnes was an eccentric millionaire
who put together the world's best collection of French impressionist art.
And my father met him at a funeral for a Lincoln Alumni, you know college president's go to funerals a lot.
[Laughing]
And he's standing waiting to go into the pulpit with the other mourners,
and this tall, white man says to my father, says I hope you're not one of those god damn negro preachers.
My father says no I'm not a negro preacher, I'm a college president.
And this man says good, because they talk too much.
So they go in, they're funeralizing the  dead man, and one of the mourners is saying that the dead man had vaguely socialistic ideas.
And this tall. white man is saying, god damn lie, god damn lie.
Saying it loud enough for people to hear in the church.
By this time my father has found out this is the eccentric millionaire, Albert Barnes.
And it's his duty as a college president to befriend this man so he'll give some money to Lincoln University. [Laughing]
And the man invites my father to come out to his home in Lower Merion and he says to him,
I have to tell you it'll just be cheese and crackers.
So my father thinks, how eccentric.
So they go out to Lower Merion, they go in his mansion which is next door to where the art is,
and he has three dining rooms and they go to one of those dining rooms where there's cheese and crackers.
And they become friends, and uh, so much so that when uh
Albert Barnes died, and he died prematurely. He was an older man when he died, but he died in an automobile accident.
>>He died in an automobile accident leaving my father's office.
>>Yes, oh that's true, I did know that.
He had changed his will so that Lincoln got to name the trustees of his art collection.
And I'm telling you this is the most impressive French impressionist art collection in the world.
In the world. In the whole world.
>>Worth billions probably.>>Yes billions.
And uh, after he, all the last Barnes trustees died,
Lincoln became the, not the owner of this art, but the manager of this art.
They can't sell it. They can't exercise any financial reward from it, but they can decide what to do with it.
And the city, the state of Pennsylvania, the city of Philadelphia,
the Lenfest Foundation, the Pew Foundation, and the Annenberg Foundation,
of course the senior Annenberg who was the uh,
what was he, he was something to the uh, >>TV Guide. >>He invented TV Guide, filthy rich guy.
He hated Albert Barnes and because Barnes
had a policy there, if you were an art critic and wanted to see his art, he would say no to you,
write a letter no to you and sign his dog's name.
[Laughing]
If you were a ditch digger and said you wanted to see the art, he'd say come ahead, he liked working people.
And he liked black people.
At any rate a big to do ensued and these foundations put up a large sum of money,
and they broke Dr. Barnes' will and they moved the art from where it was in Lower Merion to Philadelphia.
It's in a beautiful new place now, I tell you that you ought to go there, if you've never seen it you should go see it.
But it just seems so wrong to me that this man said I want my art to be in Lower Merion,
I want it to be kept in this way, >>He said it should never be sold. >>never be sold, never be moved.
>>It was displayed, you know, like most museums but all the art pieces together. >>It's still displayed the same way. >>Right.
But that's a trick on the people that did this. >>Because the court ordered it be
put together in the same way it had been always. >>Right but they're doing that and people
will say from that well this is a good thing that they moved it, they're displaying it the same thing,
but the big tragedy is they took control away from Lincoln.
>>That's exactly so. So Lincoln had control of this art, and lost control of this art and didn't fight very hard for it.
The only people that fought for the art were the students that Dr. Barnes schooled.
Dr. Barnes thought he had a school there not a museum.
And he taught a peculiar way of teaching art, and it used to be if you went to the museum
you could hear the noted art critic, Julian Bond talking about the methods that uh, [Laughing]
Albert Barnes used to educate people about this art, it's probably a good thing that, anyways.
Anyways, so I'm on the outs with Lincoln University.
And just angry at the way they handled this, I think they did handle it poorly.
They could have done better. They could have served the art better.
They could've had a better art school at that little university than any other int he country, and they didn't do it.
[Inaudible audience member speaking]
She's saying there is a great documentary about the Barnes, called The Art of the Steal.
It shows you what they mean, The Art of the Steal, the Steal.
>>I wanted to get your reaction to, whether or not you, there's something
a culture of excellence connected with the Bond family.
What about your uncle, J. Max Bond
Sr. and what about Max Bond Jr., one of the greatest black architects of the 20th century.
He designed the Schomberg, he designed the Martin Luther King Jr. Center.
He designed all kinds of wonderful things and plus he was my man at Harvard.
[Laughing]
>>Max also- >>One more thing, I'm gonna decriminalize, in the movement Julian was very famous.
He also was a poet.
He wrote a very famous poem.
"Look at that girl shake that thing, everybody can't beat Martin Luther King."
[Laughing]
>>I wanted to say Max also went to the Cambridge School where Jane and I attended and graduated.
He's a great architect. He was the architect for the King Center in Atlanta and for the Schomburg Museum
in New York.
And was working on the um, World Congress Center progress when he died.
>>And for the extra side of the Harvard University
faculty, faculty club, thank you, faculty club in New York City,
which I understand some Harvard Alumni don't like.
[Laughing]
>>Thank you. Um, I'm interested in what each of you think your father would say
to young black people today in this regard,
um, he fought for education for black people and many young people, young black people today
don't have that same sense of the value of an education.
I think of the fact that, in the year that your father was born, a white man was the number one killer of a black man,
but this year, a black man is a number one killer of a black man.
Things in the black community have shifted in ways that allow the internalization of the oppression
to move us in ways directly opposed to where your father tried to take us.
What do you think he would say to us, to young black people today and to the educators who are responsible for working with them?
>>I think he would be as critical now as he was then.
That he would not be afraid to take people to task for what he saw as failings
or failures, inability to do something, to ameliorate these problems.
I think he would do that today were he here, as he did it in years past.
>>We'll take uh, maybe one more.
Others?
Jane and James?
>>Well,
I was, at first I thought well they'd have to live with him [Laughing]
and that's not possible of course, even if he were alive that he could live with every single young black person.
Um, I don't know maybe he could do videos, but there's something about being around him
and learning about your own race and learning how wonderful black people are
how much we've gone through, how much we're still going through,
and how persistent we have been in our struggle.
I think a lot of the apathy and dislike comes from feeling bad about yourself,
not just your personal self but about your place in life
which, the United States, living in the United States you're made to feel it's your fault you're poor.
Actually I heard Junot Diaz, the writer, say that but it's true.
That the United States makes people who are poor feel it's their fault for being poor
that if they had had any kind of gumption, they would be a millionaire.
Well of course that's complete nonsense but people believe that.
And um I think it's uh, a way a lot of black people, particularly young black people, young black males,
feel that they, there's nothing for them to do.
there's only prison ahead so why not do whatever and they need to um,
I don't know if somehow they can be taught love of not only of themselves, but love of their race.
And to see how people struggled after slavery. People couldn't read.
You know, they were forbidden but they all, most of us learned to read.
Became educated.
And if we can overcome those conditions and learn, education, why can't we do it now, you know?
So somehow it, I don't know it just has to get into their minds but how to do it I'm at a complete loss.
>>You know there's a quote when uh, he writes a tribute to Du Bois when Du Bois dies, it appears in Freedomways.
And at the end of it he says what he got from Du Bois.
And he says what Du Bois taught him was "The real truth about a brutal social order, however frightening;
the beauty and dignity of black people; these learnings were almost impossible to come by,
for children of whatever color or race in the United States, when I was a child.
This is what I know that Du Bois did for me."
Well we're kinda back there again.
You know, that kind of learning is impossible today,
you know, in this country.
You know, like we don't have, don't know abou the dignity and beauty of black people.
we don't know about the brutality of the social order in which we live.
I mean there's kind of a mass confusion so if he was here this same kind of quoting of what we need to learn is very applicable today.
You know like we don't have that feeling, that we need to know these things.
>>[Audience inaudible]
>>Well I think he said the solution today is the same as it was then is a good education.
And that every child in America deserves a first class education.
And that's what uh, should be done to solve these problems.
>>Hi I'm Barbara Dean and I live in Great Barrington.
We're very proud to be living in the birth place of W.E.B. Du Bois.
And we've heard a lot about the 1969 event that dedicated the home site,
the boyhood home site of Dr. Du Bois which is now owned by UMass.
We're very delighted at how much work UMass Amherst has done to develop that site and to develop Dr. Du Bois's name,
which is still controversial in Great Barrington it's incredible that we're still having to fight this fight.
And I would love, it's wonderful to meet the three of you but I would love to hear from Julian Bond because you were the keynote speaker back in 1969,
and we've heard a lot from Elaine Gunn who was there, I believe she actually picked you up when youy flew in.
And I believe your father was there with you if I'm remembering what she said to me, um,
and the relationship to your father in this question, which again I would really love to hear your reaction to having done that.
Did you feel a lot of the controversy with anything directed at you?
But the relationship with your father is that Elaine told me that you gave a speech I think maybe that night,
somewhere else and she watched your father lean forward in such excitement and pride
listening to you speak and that had a big effect on me, because just from hearing that I realized how, what a great supporter of his children he was.
So I would love to hear any comments you might make about that.
>>That was a great occasion. Of course we knew it was controversial.
I heard today that FBI agents with drawn rifles were nearby.
Yes on the rooftop.
FBI agents with drawn rifles and they weren't,
those rifles were not pointed at the vigilantes who gathered at the site there,
they were intended for the people like myself, and Ossie Davis, and my father,
and a group of progressive people who had gathered for this occasion.
But that was a wonder, wonderful occasion, I remember it very,very fondly.
It was just great.
It was just, what can I say, it was wonderful.
>>I turn the program back
Barbara
>>I'm interested in your thoughts,
the speech that you gave at the Democratic National Convention,
yeah just what that was like for you and what your thinking was as you gave that speech.
And by the way I was a school teacher in Kansas City, Missouri at the time
and there were people there who swore that you could not possibly be a black person because a black person couldn't give a speech like that.
[Laughing]
>>I tell you, I don't remember much about the speech.
It was partially written for me.
And I'm embarrassed to say I cannot remember the name of the guy who wrote it.
But a well known writer.
And it was a wonderful, wonderful speech and of course I'm always thinking when someone else writes the speech for you, when you give it
it's your speech, and it was my speech.
But it was a wonderful, wonderful speech and I just can't recall much of it.
I'm sorry to say.
But it was great.
[Inaudible]
Well good.
>>Well, I would like to thank the Bond family for being with us today.
Thank you very much. [Clapping]
[Clapping]
And a special thanks to Dr. Bracey and Dr. Shabazz for your help in moderating the panel. Thank you very much.
[Clapping]
We do have a special presentation to make to the three Bond children that are with us today.
This is an award called the Credo Award that comes from the University of Massachusetts Libraries and Special Collections and University Archives,
and it is presented to James Bond, Julian Bond, and Jane Bond in recognition of their significant contributions to preserving the history of social change.
So thank you all.
[Clapping]
