It was Bond's late father, Horace Mann Bond, whose friendship with Albert C. Barnes led to Lincoln's influence over the foundation. Before Barnes died in 1951, he granted Lincoln the authority to name four of the five members of his foundation's board.
When Julian Bond read last fall that the Barnes board was seemingly turning its back on Lincoln, by proposing to greatly reduce the university's role and relocate the Barnes art, "I got hot," he said in a recent interview.
"[My father] left . . . a good legacy," Bond said. "This was something he had done, he had accomplished, and all of a sudden it was threatened, threatened with erasure."
Why, Bond wonders, have those who are financially backing the foundation's proposal to move the art collection insisted upon a reduction in Lincoln's role? "That invites the question, 'Is race an issue here?' Bond said. "Would this have happened if it had been Swarthmore?"
So whenever he can - in a pointed letter to backers of the move, during a speech at a West Virginia college, at a party attended by the husband of a National Public Radio producer, in a letter to the New York Times - Bond is spreading his message: Leave my father's legacy alone.
"I talk about it all the time," he said.
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The collection Albert Barnes assembled is breathtaking, with 181 Renoirs, 69 Cezannes, 60 Matisses, just to start.
But the endowment he left to support it didn't last, and by September, the foundation's board said bankruptcy was imminent. To ward it off, the foundation said it had signed an agreement with the Pew Charitable Trusts, the Lenfest Foundation and the Annenberg Foundation to seek court permission to move the collection to a more accessible location: a "museum row" along the Benjamin Franklin Parkway.
The proposal included expanding the Barnes board to 15 members - the goal being to add prominent, wealthy benefactors. Lincoln, though, would still nominate just four.
