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Librarian Julia Agnes Washington Bond died in her sleep November 2, 2007. She was 99 years old. She was born on June 20, 1908 in Nashville, Tennessee, where her parents had graduated from Fisk. Her mother, Daisy Agnes Turner Washington, worked as a teacher and her father, George Elihu Washington, served as the principal of Pearl High School. Both stressed the importance of education.

Julia Bond attended Meigs School until the eighth grade, and then went on to Pearl High School where she graduated in 1924 when she was 16 years old. Like her parents, she attended Fisk University and graduated with a B.A. degree in English in 1929. In her senior year at Fisk University, she met a young instructor, one of the few African American teachers at Fisk University in those days, Horace Mann Bond. Soon, they were courting.

The couple wed in 1929, at the University of Chicago, and then redid their wedding ceremony in Nashville in order to satisfy their parents. They both attended graduate school at the University of Chicago, however, Julia dropped out of school while her husband earned his Ph.D. They had three children, Jane Marguerite, Horace Julian, and James George. Bond and her husband supported their sons, Julian and James in their civil rights activities with the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee in the 1960s and have supported Julian's public service career. She was also very proud of her daughter, Jane.

In 1934 Julia Bond and her husband spent several months living in Washington Parish in rural southeastern Louisiana. Horace Bond had been sent there to conduct a study of rural black schools, but he also kept a journal detailing the lives of the poor black farm families among which they lived. The journal was published in 1997 as The Star Creek Papers with Horace and Julia Bond listed as authors. (Horace Mann Bond and Julia W. Bond, The Star Creek Papers, ed. Adam Fairclough) (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1997).

Her husband, Dr. Horace Mann Bond, was appointed president of Georgia's Fort Valley State College (for Negroes) in 1942. In 1945, he became president of Lincoln University in Pennsylvania. Julia Agnes Bond acted as First Lady for her husband in all of these positions. She also traveled with her husband to Europe and Africa on behalf of the University. She attended the inauguration of Osageyfo Kwame Nkrumah as Ghana's first president in 1957. Dr. Bond was President of Fort Valley Normal and Industrial School (later Fort Valley State University) from 1939 to 1954, and President of his alma mater, Lincoln University in Pennsylvania, from 1945 to 1957. The Bonds moved to Atlanta, where Dr. Bond became dean of the School of Education at Atlanta University (later Clark Atlanta University). He later became the director of the Bureau of Educational and Social Research at the school until his retirement in 1971. Dr. Bond died in 1972.

Returning to school at Atlanta University, Julia Bond earned a degree in library science at the age of 56 and was circulation librarian at the university’s Trevor Arnett Library for seven years. She was a mainstay of the Atlanta University Library, beginning in the 1960s and continued to work as a part-time reference librarian at the university’s Robert W. Woodruff Library. Eventually, Bond retired from the Atlanta University Library in 2000, at the age of 92 years.

When the Insider's Guide to Greater Atlanta asked her what changes she had seen, she said: “Desegregation is the most prominent change. When we moved here (Atlanta) our children were very frightened. We went to the courthouse to register our cars and they had a rope dividing the white people from the black. If anyone in the white line needed attention, all the blacks had to wait. That really terrified my children. They had never seen anything like it. Julian was so afraid that he wouldn’t go downtown for clothes, but they soon got over it.”

“There was a lot of conflict and a lot of worry. When Horace worked for the Rosenwald Fund he traveled the south a lot and I was afraid something would happen.  Anything could happen with just a little provocation. You always traveled in the daytime and you stopped where you knew someone.”

“When we moved here, Atlanta was just a sleepy little town. It has changed but I never really felt a great sense of change.  It has been so gradual, day by day.  I really wouldn’t want to live anywhere else now – would you?  I think this is an ideal city.”

In addition to her children – Jane Marguerite Bond Moore, Horace Julian Bond and James George Bond, she is survived by grandchildren Phyllis Jane Bond-McMillan, Horace Mann Bond II, Michael Julian Bond, Jeffrey Alvin Bond, Julia Louise Bond, Grace Moore, Constance Moore, Kojo Moore, and eight great grandchildren.

Services will be announced. In lieu of flowers, donations in her name may be sent to Fisk University in Nashville and the NAACP.

Click here to contact BC Editorial Board Member Julian Bond.