James Bond, The Civil Rights Activist

Black History Month in Appalachia is the opportunity to recognize, celebrate and honor those African Americans who didn’t allow stereotypes or regional prejudice to hinder their dreams and ambitions of making the world a better, more just place for their race.
This week, the Museum Corner is surprised to learn the history of Knox Countian and civil rights activist Rev. James Bond.
James Bond was born into slavery on September 5, 1863, on the Anderson County farm of Preston Bond. Preston Bond is listed in the 1860 census as a thirty-five-year-old white farmer who had $2,700 in real estate and $3,490 in personal property. Bond owned four slaves, three males and an eighteen-year-old woman. The slave woman was likely James Bond’s mother, Jane. Family tradition claims that Preston Bond fathered Jane’s two sons, James and Henry.
When slavery was officially abolished on December 18, 1865, following the national ratification of the 13th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, Jane moved to Knox County with her sons James and Henry. Jane Bond appears in the 1880 Knox County Census as a forty-year-old “mulatto” servant living in the household of her sister, Mary Ervin, and brother-in-law, James Ervin, who at the time are living in the Brush Creek community of Knox County. Also listed in the house are the boys, James, age sixteen, and Henry, fifteen. Both are identified as farm laborers, and both were attending school.
According to sources, because Berea College was the only integrated college in the south, and around the time of the 1880 census, James left Knox County for schooling at Berea. It was said to pay his tuition, he drove a steer the seventy-five-mile distance.
James required a significant amount of remedial work to catch up with the other students, but his persistence paid off when he graduated from Berea in 1892. He continued his education by pursuing a divinity degree from Oberlin College, where he graduated in 1895. Bond served as a minister in Tennessee for a time and then took a job with the Lincoln Institute in Shelby County, Kentucky, as a fundraiser.
Following the 1904 Day Law that segregated Kentucky schools, Bond led fundraising efforts for the Lincoln Institute, ensuring African American students still had access to higher education.
Bond tried to join the military during World War I as a chaplain, but he was rejected due to his age (around 46 years old at the time.) He did, however, work with black soldiers through the YMCA at Camp Zachary Taylor in Louisville during that conflict.
He later served as the first Kentucky Director of the Commission on Interracial Cooperation. In this role, Bond worked to open lines of communication between the races and worked to provide mutually satisfying solutions to issues.
Bond married Jane Alice Brown on December 24, 1895, and they remained together for 34 years until James’s death in 1929. Together they had six children, Gilbert Dodson, James Palmer, Thomas Moore, James Maxwell, Horace Mann and Lucy Jane. James and Jane Alice lived most of the time together at 2549 Magazine St. Their home still stands today.
Bond died on January 15, 1929, at age sixty-five. His influence provided an powerful example for his descendants. His son, Horace Mann Bond, was a college professor at Fisk University and later at Fort Valley State. Horace’s son and James’ grandson, Julian Bond helped establish the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), was a co-founder of the Southern Poverty Law Center located in Montgomery, Alabama and served 20 years in the Georgia State Legislature. He was a professor of history at University of Virginia and the National Chair of the NAACP for twelve years.
We would like to give credit to the Kentucky Center for African American Heritage as well as the Kentucky Historical Society for information on this article. We had no idea that Julian Bond’s grandfather was a Knox Countian or the influence he had on Julian’s civil rights activism. Happy Black History Month everyone!