Lincoln University - Lion Yearbook (Lincoln University, PA)

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The opening Centennial Convocation, Fall, 1953, during which President Bond conferred a honororay doctors degree upon His Excellency, Clarence L. Simpson, Liberian Ambassador to United States. President Emeritus William Hallock Johnson and fellow academicians during Graduation 1943. Still (1954) active as a member of the Board, William Hallock Johnson was succeded, in 1936, by Walter L. Wright, who retired in 1945, and died on January 17, 1946. President Wright had been in the Lincoln Faculty since 1892; he was deeply beloved by all Lincoln men. Both Presi- dents Johnson and Wright achieved veritable miracles, appreciated fully neither by Trustees or Alumni, in restoring the financial foundations of the institution. President Wright was succeeded by Horace Mann Bond, the first alumnus (and Negro) to be elected to the post. His election was viewed with elation by the radical humani- tarian portion of the Alumni, who had been petitioning the Board since 1875 for Negro rep- resentation in the Faculty, Board and Adminis- tration. By others, the step was viewed with alarm. Ill Set in a World where few men, and no institu- tions, achieve perfection, Lincoln University has reached to the stars. Its earliest aim was to elevate a special portion of humanity; Africans, in America and the Ancestral Continent, were the unique focus of the institution's mission in human brotherhood. (The first Atom bomb was exploded on August 6, 1945, in war, over Hiroshima, 70,000 people were killed. World War 11 ended. In 1948 Thur- good Marshall, '29, successfully argued the cases of Sweatt vs. Univ. of Texas, and McClaurin vs. University of Oklahoma, before the United States Supreme Court; obtaining a partial reversal of United States Supreme Court ruling, upholding the separate but equal” segregation doctrine in the 1889 case of Plessy vs. Ferguson.) The old mission has been grandly, nobly ful- filled, in Africa and in America. The Trustees have now designed a new and revolutionary function. The new pattern is for a college com- munity which will serve as a living laboratory for international understanding;” this is Lin- coln's answer to the problems posed by man's stumbling struggle toward a world governed by reason and concord among human beings. Though difficult, it is no more so than that set for an institution, 100 years ago, that pro- posed then to give the highest education to a race then hopelessly enslaved, its very human capacity decried and rejected. Men throughout the World are today enslaved by national, racial and cultural animosities, and face not remotely the prospect of being atomized, along with all their works and deeds. (On March 1, 1954, a perfected Hydrogen Bob was exploded at Bikini. It was 700 times as destructive as Hiroshima’s first Atom bomb.) The new Program of Lincoln University is a new design to reach, again, toward the infinite heavens of human aspiration, under God.

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. Student Instructors, 1953-34 'SSts rdS r- ; TW

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% ree men in a f ree tuorfd hroucjh edu ca tion and hrotherh.ood