Margaret Bonds earned her Bachelor's and Master's degrees in music from Northwestern University and continued her study at Julliard. She was influential in contributing to the resurgence of public appreciation for spirituals. In 1932, at age 19, she earned the Wanamaker Foundation Prize for her song Sea Ghost. Bonds became the first black American soloist to appear with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra in 1933 when she performed Piano Concerto in F Minor at the 1933 World's Fair. In 1939 she went to New York City where she worked as an editor in the Clarence Williams music publishing firm and began to compose popular songs. Although she was only moderately successful as a pop composer, her career as a concert composer is significant.

Primarily a composer of vocal music, her most famous arrangements include He's Got the Whole World in His Hands, musical compositions of Langston Hughes's poems, The Negro Speaks of Rivers and The Ballad of the Brown King, and Countee Cullen's To a Brown girl Dead. She received a Rosenwald Fellowship, toured, and performed a piano duet with Gerald Cook on radio broadcasts. In the 1960s, her compositions and were commissioned and recorded by Leontyne Price. In 1965, during the march on Montgomery, she composed Montgomery Variations, an orchestral piece dedicated to Martin Luther King, Jr.

Bonds is perhaps most renowned for her jazz and ragtime-influenced arrangements of spirituals. While music critics regard Bonds as conservative with respect to classical music, she is also considered innovative for infusing jazz harmonies and rhythms into classical forms. Awards from the National Association of Negro Musicians, National Council of Negro Women, Northwestern University Alumni Association, and the American Society of Composers, Authors, and Publishers, marked her career. A pioneering musician, Bonds remained humble. Acknowledging her indebtedness to Will Marion Cook and H.T. Burleigh, she reflected, "I came to realize that most composers at one time or another reflect their friends."¹⁸