Background
Miller was born in 1934 as Yvonne Bond in Edenton, North Carolina, the eldest child of thirteen, to John T. and Pency C. Bond. She was raised in Norfolk after her family moved there.
Miller was born in 1934 as Yvonne Bond in Edenton, North Carolina, the eldest child of thirteen, to John T. and Pency C. Bond. She was raised in Norfolk after her family moved there.
She attended local public schools, which were then segregated by state law. Bond attended all-black Norfolk Division of Virginia State College, a historically black college (now Norfolk State University), for two years. She completed a Bachelor of Surgery degree in 1956 from the segregated, all-black Virginia State College (also a historically black college) in St. Petersburg, now Virginia State University.
Four years later, she was elected to the state Senate, and was consistently re-elected after that, dying in office. Miller began to get involved in politics, joining the Democratic Party. She brought her concerns for education and minority rights to her political career, where she was known as an "outspoken advocate for Virginia’s poor and minorities in the General Assembly".
In 2012, she spoke out against efforts by the state legislature to require voters to bring new identification documents to polling places, likening it to Jim Crow-era requirements intended to suppress black voting.
She made news in 1983 as the first black woman to be elected to the Virginia House of Delegates, serving two terms from 1984-1988. In 1987 she ran and was elected to her first four-year term in the Senate of Virginia.
The first African-American woman in Virginia to serve in each house, she was consistently re-elected to the Senate and died in office. Miller most recently represented the 5th state senate district, which since 1971 and a redistricting, has been made up of parts of the independent cities of Norfolk, Chesapeake and Virginia Beach.
At the time of her death, Miller was the longest-serving woman in the Virginia Senate, ranking 4th in overall seniority.
She gained a seat on the budget-writing Finance Committee. Due to repeated re-election, she gained seniority and in 1996, she became the first woman to chair a Senate committee, gaining the chair of the Transportation Committee. On July 3, 2012, Miller died in her Norfolk home from stomach cancer, one day shy of her 78th birthday.