Born: November 18, 1889 (Montgomery, Alabama)
Died: May 5, 1948
Biography:
Caroline Stewart Bond Day (November 18, 1889 – May 5, 1948) was an American physical anthropologist, author, and educator. She was one of the first African-Americans to receive a degree in anthropology. Day is recognized as a pioneer physical anthropologist whose study helped future black researchers and is used to challenge scientific racism about miscegenation. She published various essays in the 1920s and early 1930s, as well as a short story The Pink Hat, which is believed to be autobiographical. In 1927, she returned to Radcliffe, where she obtained a master’s degree in anthropology in 1930. Her thesis, A Study of Some Negro-White Families in the United States, published in 1932, contained sociological and anthropological information on 350 mixed-race family histories with over 400 photographs. She subsequently spent a number of years teaching at Howard University. Day retired to Durham, North Carolina in 1939. She died on May 5, 1948, having been in poor health.
Day was the first African-American who turned her lens on her own family and social world, Negro-White families, in order to scientifically measure and record the hybridity of mixed race families by using the language of what she referred to as blood-quantum that illustrates the fraction of racial types. Her research challenged the perception of inferiority of non-whites. She attempted to eliminate racial preconception and discrimination and advocated social equality for all African-Americans. Although Day’s work was not well received within contemporary scholarship in the early twentieth century and still remains controversial, her scientific research re-evaluates the accomplishments of African-American women in the white-male-dominated field of physical anthropology and marks the first step in understanding and promoting African-American biological vindication.
Early life
Caroline Bond Day was born on November 18, 1889, to Georgia and Moses Steward in Montgomery, Alabama. According to her own calculations of blood quantum, Day was a mulatto; 7/16 Negro; 1/16 Indian; and 8/16 White. After her father’s death, her mother moved to Tuskegee, Alabama, where she taught at Tuskegee Elementary School, and married John Percy Bond, a life insurance company executive. Day took her stepfather’s last name and had a half-sister, Wenonah Bond Logan, and a half-brother, Jack Bond.
Education
After Day attended Tuskegee Elementary School (1905) and Atlanta University High School (1908), she received a bachelor’s degree at Atlanta University in 1912, but her major and courses are unknown. Day entered Radcliffe College in 1916. She took undergraduate courses with Earnest Hooton, the only physical anthropologist within the academic department at Harvard and became the editor of her research project. Day obtained her bachelor’s degree from Radcliffe in 1919 and earned a master’s degree from Harvard in 1932.
Research
By continuing to collect data from people of mixed black and