He earned graduate and doctoral degrees from University of Chicago at a time when only a small percentage of any young adults attended any college.

He was an influential leader at several historically black colleges and was appointed the first president of Fort Valley State University in Georgia in 1939, where he managed its growth in programs and revenue.

His mother, Jane Alice Browne, was a schoolteacher, and his father, James Bond, was a minister who served at Congregational churches across the South, often associated with historically black colleges.

In another, his father was arrested by a white neighbor, who was a police officer, when the Bond family moved into an all-white street.

[7] Bond graduated in 1923 at age 19 with honors from Lincoln University, a historically black college in Pennsylvania.

At Penn State, where he went for graduate work, Bond realized that he was able to compete with white classmates, and earned competitive grades above the 90th percentile.

Bond then suffered the only setback to his success; he was dismissed from the college for tolerating a gambling ring in a dormitory which he was supervising.

In his social activism and long political career, the younger Bond achieved a national renown beyond his father's.

In 1953, together with historians John Hope Franklin and C. Vann Woodward, Bond did research that helped support the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP)'s landmark US Supreme Court case of Brown v. Board of Education (1954).

Bond, concluded that "the medial score of White soldiers from the states of Mississippi, Kentucky, Arkansas, and Georgia, averaged ... the mental age of a twelve and a half year old child".

He published the results in an essay titled ""Intelligence of Congressmen Who Signed the 'Southern Manifesto' as Measured by IQ Tests".

Here he concluded that based on the Army intelligence tests the average of signing senators was in the lowest 20% of American Whites, on average signatories attended a college of the lowest ten percent of median National scores, and had a constituency whose majority was in the intelligence category of "morons".

Consequently, Bond concluded, the logical policy recommendation following the reasoning of the senators, would be to segregate the slow-learning signatories into a group together where they could have "remedial attention to make up for their basic deficiencies".

Bond concluded that all Shuey had proven was that "everywhere in the United States the American Negro is a subordinated underprivileged social caste".

In 2005 Pennsylvania Governor Edward Rendell brokered a settlement between the Foundation and the university that would allow moving the collection to Center City.

In his research, he studied the social, economic, and geographic factors influencing academic achievement of black children.