J. Max Bond Jr.

James Max Bond Jr. was born on July 17, 1935, in Louisville, Kentucky, into a distinguished family of scholars. His father, J. Max Bond Sr., was a sociologist who served as Dean at Atlanta University, as President of the University of Liberia in the early 1950s, and later as an education official with the United States government abroad; his uncle Horace Mann Bond was a noted educator, and his cousin Julian Bond a civil-rights leader. Bond entered Harvard College at sixteen, earning his bachelor's degree in 1955 and a Master of Architecture from the Harvard Graduate School of Design in 1958.

A Fulbright scholarship carried him to France, where he apprenticed in the atelier of Le Corbusier under André Wogenscky. He worked in Ghana in the mid-1960s before returning to New York, where he led the Architects' Renewal Committee in Harlem (ARCH), giving early form to a lifelong conviction that architecture should serve community and dignity.

In 1969 Bond co-founded Bond Ryder & Associates with Donald P. Ryder. From that practice came landmarks of Black American memory: the Studio Museum in Harlem, the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, the Martin Luther King Jr. Center for Nonviolent Social Change in Atlanta, and the Birmingham Civil Rights Institute. After the firm merged with Davis, Brody & Associates in 1990, he became a partner at Davis Brody Bond. He also chaired Columbia University's architecture division and served as dean at the City College of New York.

At his death in Manhattan on February 18, 2009, he was the partner in charge of the museum at the National September 11 Memorial & Museum. He built places where a people could remember and be seen. May his houses of memory keep his name.