The First Black President of Lincoln University, Horace Mann Bond, Was a Member of Kappa Alpha Psi

Did you know that Horace Mann Bond, the first Black president of Lincoln University and the first president of what is now Fort Valley State University, was a member of Kappa Alpha Psi Fraternity, Inc.? Bond was initiated through the Epsilon Chapter at Lincoln University in Pennsylvania, the fraternity’s first chapter in the East, and went on to become one of the most influential Black educators of the twentieth century.

Born November 8, 1904, in Nashville, Tennessee, Bond was the grandson of enslaved Africans and the son of two college-educated parents. A gifted student, he enrolled at Lincoln University at just 14 years old and earned his undergraduate degree in 1923. He later completed his master’s and doctorate at the University of Chicago, where his dissertation on Black education in Alabama won the Rosenberger Prize and was published as “Negro Education in Alabama: A Study in Cotton and Steel.”

Bond built his career lifting up historically Black colleges. In 1939, he became the first president of Fort Valley State College, now Fort Valley State University, in Georgia, guiding the young institution’s growth in programs and funding. Then in 1945, he returned to his alma mater to make history as the first Black president, and first alumnus president, of Lincoln University, the nation’s oldest degree-granting HBCU. He led the school for the next twelve years.

His scholarship reached far beyond any single campus. In the years leading up to the landmark 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision, Bond contributed research, alongside historians John Hope Franklin and C. Vann Woodward, that helped support the NAACP’s successful challenge to school segregation.

Bond’s legacy also lived on through his family. He was the father of Julian Bond, the civil rights leader who helped found the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee and later chaired the NAACP. Horace Mann Bond died on December 21, 1972, in Atlanta, leaving behind a record that embodies Kappa Alpha Psi’s founding aim of achievement in every field of human endeavor.

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