Founders’ Day at Berea College Honors Lincoln Institute on Centennial Anniversary
11/29/10
The eleventh annual Founders’ Day Convocation on Thursday, Oct. 7, 2010, at 3 p.m. in Phelps Stokes Chapel at Berea College will celebrate Berea’s interracial history by honoring the alumni, faculty and staff of Lincoln Institute on its 100th anniversary. Berea College founded Lincoln Institute as an educational institution for black students after the passage of the Day Law in 1904 forbade interracial education in Kentucky. President Larry D. Shinn will present the John G. Fee Award to representatives of Lincoln Institute and Lincoln Foundation. As part of the ceremony, the college’s Black Music Ensemble will perform.
Also on Oct. 4 at noon in the Woods-Penniman Commons, students Sherri Jenkins and Triston Jones will present their summer undergraduate research project “Preserving the History of Lincoln Institute.” Lunch will be served at 11:45 a.m. An exhibit “The Lincoln Institute: 100 Years of History” will be on display in the Black Cultural Center from 9-11 a.m. each day from Oct. 4- Nov. 1, 2010. This exhibit is on loan from Gary Brown, a 1962 alumnus of Lincoln Institute.
Lincoln Institute was founded in 1910 on 444 acres in Shelby County, Kentucky, by trustees and alumni of Berea College, the only integrated school in Kentucky at that time. Lincoln Institute’s first building, Berea Hall, was erected in 1911 and the first classes took place in the fall of 1912 with an enrollment of 85 boarding students. The curriculum at Lincoln Institute emphasized vocational education: home economics and training in agriculture for women and the building trades and maintenance engineering for men. There was also a teacher training course. All students worked one day a week without pay maintaining the campus and students could also work additionally for a small wage to pay for their school expenses. Like Berea, Lincoln Institute was a non-denominational Christian school.
In 1941, the Kentucky General Assembly mandated that all local boards of education “provide all students living within their districts with the opportunity to acquire a high school education” either by transporting students to a nearby school system or paying their room and board expenses. Because half of Kentucky’s 120 counties did not provide high school facilities for black students many districts opted to sign contracts with Lincoln Institute for the education of their black students.
One of Lincoln Institute’s most notable members was James Bond, and Berea alumnus and grandfather to civil rights icon Julian Bond, former chairman of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP). When Lincoln Institute opened James Bond served as its financial agent and enrolled his children in the school. One of those children was his youngest son, Horace Mann Bond, Julian Bond’s father. Horace Bond went on to earn a doctorate and was a distinguished educator who served as president of two colleges and was later dean of the school of education at Atlanta University. James Bond, who graduated from Berea College in 1892, later served as a college trustee and was posthumously honored during Berea’s 2003 Founders’ Day.
In 1947, Lincoln Institute became a public school supported by the state and all property and buildings were deeded to the state with the stipulation that it would be used for educational purposes. It wasn’t until the Day Law was amended in 1950 that black students were permitted to return to Berea College. In 1965, Lincoln Institute officially closed because, legally, desegregation of schools made a separate all-black school unnecessary. Currently, the campus is a Job Corps facility.
