UVA’s Julian Bond Papers Project Receives $2.04 Million Mellon Grant to Expand Access and Reach

The College and Graduate School of Arts & Sciences at the University of Virginia has announced that it will receive a $2.04 million grant from the Mellon Foundation for the Julian Bond Papers Project, a major investment that will accelerate efforts to digitize, annotate and publish the vast archive of civil rights leader, educator and activist Julian Bond.

The manuscript collection managed by the project is housed at UVA's Albert and Shirley Small Special Collections Library. Deborah McDowell, the Alice Griffin Professor of Literary Studies at UVA and founder and director of the Julian Bond Papers Project, leads the team to make Bond's extensive collection of writings, speeches and correspondence freely accessible to scholars, students and the public. With the new funding, the project will expand its transcription and editorial efforts, develop new public outreach initiatives and support student apprenticeships that train the next generation of historians and digital scholars.  

“This is a significant infusion of resources into the project that will accelerate the pace of digitization with the goal of making these papers widely accessible,” McDowell said.

A Legacy of Leadership and Social Change

A central figure in the Civil Rights Movement, Julian Bond was co-founder of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, an organization focusing on nonviolent, direct-action campaigns against segregation and racism in the 1960s. He later served as the first president of the Southern Poverty Law Center, spent 20 years in the Georgia state legislature and became a nationally recognized leader as chairman of the NAACP.

Bond was also a longtime professor at UVA, where he taught history and civil rights studies from 1990 to 2012. His extensive archive of 47,000 documents offers a unique and comprehensive look at the social and political movements of the late 20th century, including school desegregation, voting rights, the Vietnam War, LGBTQ rights and environmental justice.

“The fundamental goal of this project is to make Julian Bond’s massive archive free, searchable and accessible to students, scholars, community organizers and the general public,” said McDowell. “Right now, if someone wants to access Bond’s papers, they have to go physically to the Special Collections library, which means many of those outside Charlottesville are effectively locked out. This project removes those barriers and broadens access to his work.”  

Expanding a Digital Archive for Public Access

Launched in 2013 as a collaboration between UVA’s Carter G. Woodson Institute, the UVA Library and the University’s Center for Digital Editing, with funding from the National Archives’ National Historical Publications and Records Commission, the Julian Bond Papers Project has already made significant progress in transcribing and publishing Bond’s speeches. More than 10,000 pages have been transcribed through efforts that include volunteer transcription events hosted by the project. As of August 2018, the project has invited the public to participate in its work by helping to transcribe Bond documents through the crowdsourcing platform FromThePage. The Mellon grant will allow the team to scale up these efforts, moving beyond speeches to digitize Bond’s correspondence, political writings and other materials.

“The archive is vast,” said Jennifer Bair, senior associate dean for academic affairs speaking on behalf of the University’s College and Graduate School of Arts & Sciences which supported the project team’s proposal. “There are other, much smaller collections, but the UVA collection is both the largest and the most comprehensive in terms of the different kinds of materials included. Julian Bond’s life was incredibly well-documented, and this funding will enable indexing and search tools to make the materials more usable and provide support for developing educational curricula around Bond’s legacy.”

The project’s expansion will engage community historians, students and scholars in the work of interpreting and annotating Bond’s writings, ensuring that his words remain relevant and accessible for generations to come.  

The Mellon Foundation is the nation’s largest supporter of the arts and humanities aimed at advancing projects that preserve and expand access to historical and cultural knowledge, and its support will not only facilitate the work of transcribing the archive but also of transforming it into a foundation for new research and scholarship.

“With this Mellon funding, we can focus not just on digitizing and transcribing documents but also adding historical context and annotations, so the materials are meaningful and accessible,” said Laura Baker, managing editor for the Bond Papers Project who, along with McDowell and project manager James Perla, manage the project’s activities.  

Creating Educational and Career Opportunities

In addition to making the archive more accessible, the project is also an important training ground for students. Funding from the Mellon grant will support student apprenticeships, offering hands-on experience in digital publishing, archival research and historical analysis. “Bond was deeply invested in young people, believing that they are essential agents of change, just as he and his cohorts at SNCC had been,” McDowell said.

“One of the most rewarding parts of this project has been working with students,” Baker added. “We train them in digital publishing, archival work and research, but they also bring their own skills and fresh perspectives, making this a truly collaborative effort.”

The funding will also help develop new ways to integrate Bond’s work into university curricula, making it a living educational resource for classes on civil rights, political history and social justice movements.

Christa Acampora, Buckner W. Clay Professor of Philosophy and dean of the College and Graduate School of Arts & Sciences at UVA, emphasized the importance of this collection and McDowell’s leadership in advancing the project. 

“Professor McDowell’s leadership and vision for the Julian Bond Papers Project have been truly inspiring,” Acampora said. “Her dedication to preserving and amplifying Bond’s legacy has made this initiative a model for scholarship and public engagement. I couldn’t be more excited about what this funding will enable — deepening our commitment to civil rights history, fostering new research, supporting experiential learning opportunities for our students, and ensuring that future generations can engage with Bond’s profound contributions to our society. We are truly grateful to the Mellon Foundation for their support.” 

For McDowell, the project is both a scholarly endeavor and a way to honor Bond’s lifelong commitment to justice.

“Julian Bond was deeply committed to social justice and the public good, to ‘we the people’ and his archive reflects that commitment,” McDowell said. “Across the decades, his speeches, which still resonate today, sound this note. They speak both to his foresight and to the sluggish pace of change. His life’s work was about struggle, about challenging injustice and preserving democracy. We have a responsibility to continue that fight. As Bond once put it in a speech: “If there is an opening for an American era of politics different from the past, then it must be a citizen’s democracy. . . a system of equally distributing wealth and power in an organized society, through institutions based on the premise the we all have equal ability  — and equal right  — to make decisions about our lives and our future.”