Margaret Allison Bonds (1913-1972) was a composer, pianist, and teacher from Chicago whose career extended from the 1930s through the 1960s, a period in which the nation’s cultural and political landscapes were dramatically shaped by the Harlem Renaissance, the Chicago Renaissance, and the modern civil rights movement.  Her early studies with her mother, who attended the Chicago Musical College, led to studies in piano and composition with Florence Price and others in high school, followed by study at Northwestern University, where she obtained her BM and MM in music in 1933 and 1934. She also did graduate work at Juilliard, where she returned several times for various courses throughout her life.

As a student at Northwestern she encountered significant prejudice and discrimination for the first time but took comfort from her discovery of the poetry of Langston Hughes.  She later set many of his poems and corresponded with him extensively.  It was around the same time she acquired a young Ned Rorem as a piano student; he later cited her as an important influence and the two remained close. In the 1940s she moved to New York and remained there until the late 1960s; while there she had hoped to study with Nadia Boulanger, but Boulanger told her she had no need to study with anyone.

In 1962 she published her setting of Etienne De Grellet's (1773-1835) poem I Shall Pass Through This World  for unaccompanied mixed chorus.