By Martin  Kilson

J. Max Bond, Jr., the renowned architect who died February 19, left a loving family and many friends. As this appreciation by a longtime friend indicates, Bond was the inheritor of a long, proud tradition within Black America.

– The Editors

When a longtime, dear friend dies, it’s often their soulful  qualities-those that will initially be missed-that come to mind. For me, this was true of J. Max Bond, one of my closest  friends and civil rights activist confreres.

J. Max Bond Jr. (Photo by Fred Conrad, NY Times)

Max Bond was a person riddled with soul, so to speak, a person full of purpose. While most of us exhibit ordinary purpose as creatures on this troubled earth, he displayed something grander: a “humane purpose,” which he applied evenhandedly  across different human spaces and situations.

Gordon Davis, the founding chairman of Jazz at Lincoln Center, and another close friend of Max’s, put this point marvelously to the New York Times: “[Max had a] steel spine and rock-hard determination-qualities always masked by a handsome gentlemanly exterior, a gracious and extraordinarily collegial persona, and so many of the characteristics that are hallmarks of a great and wonderful teacher and mentor.”

The humane purpose-liberal and progressive-that Max conveyed in his professional years was inherited, one could say. He and I were in the same age cohort; I first  encountered his ancestral line over a half-century ago when I entered one of the historically black colleges as a freshman in 1949. The college was Lincoln University in Pennsylvania, founded just before the Civil War in 1854 by anti-slavery movement white Presbyterians, “decent white folks” as my African Methodist [Episcopal] clergyman father called them.

Lincoln was the first institution of higher education for African Americans in the country. Max’s uncle, the great sociologist Horace Mann Bond, was president of Lincoln during my years there. His brother, George Clement Bond, has been for decades professor of cultural anthropology at Teachers College of Columbia University and director of the university’s Institute of African Studies. And a cousin is Julian Bond, chairman of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), professor of history at the University of Virginia, a former Georgia state legislator, and one of the founding members of the legendary 1960s civil rights group, the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC).

Max especially drew his sense of humane purpose from his parents, J. Max Bond Sr. and Ruth Clement Bond. His father had earned his doctorate at the University of Southern California in the 1930s and spent many years thereafter developing and expanding the New Deal-created education and agriculture-extension programs for black farmers in the South. (The younger Max was born in Louisville, Kentucky.) His mother, who grew up in the church of an African Methodist Episcopal Bishop, organized master quilt-sewing groups among rural African-American farm families during the 1930s.

The Martin Luther King., Jr., Center for Nonviolent Social Change in Atlanta

Fortunately for Max and for us, his inherited humane purpose inner-gift was intensified by his marriage to Jean Carey who, like Max, had been born into a family of individuals possessing serious humane purpose. Jean’s maternal grandfather, Benjamin J. Davis, Sr. was a successful businessman and newspaper publisher in Atlanta. His son, Jean’s uncle, was Benjamin J. Davis, Jr., a brilliant and controversial Harvard Law School-trained lawyer.

That extraordinary family legacy produced and then reinforced Max’s “progressive esprit.” It was evident to me when we first met as students at Harvard in the mid-1950s, just as the transformative, mass-action consciousness of the postwar black freedom struggle was permeating even the ivied enclaves of white colleges and universities. Max, who had entered Harvard at 15, and I were among the small band who joined the fledgling black student group (Harvard then had little more than three dozen or so blacks in the entire university), whose formation was provoked by the burning of a five-foot high KKK cross in front of a Harvard freshman dormitory.

That same progressive spirit informed Max’s human advancement gregariousness. So it was not surprising that the early 1960s found him and Jean in newly-independent Ghana. Max worked for the government as an architect and then taught at the new University of Science & Technology in Kumasi-the country’s main hinterland city-from 1963 to 1968. I was a visiting professor at the University of Ghana in Accra in 1964-1965, and my wife, Marion, and I visited Max and Jean there. We found a vibrant cadre of African-American professionals who had gathered in Ghana to lend their talents to the effort of Ghana’s president, Kwame Nkrumah (a Lincoln University graduate) to build a viable modern state. They included such figures as the great sociologist Professor St. Clair Drake; Maya Angelou, who organized Ghana’s Dance Studio and taught modern dance at the University of Ghana; the novelist Julian Mayfield and his wife, Dr. Ana Livia Cordero, who operated the only prenatal medical center in all of Accra; Jean Hutson, a top-ranked librarian at the New York Public Library who helped expand the University of Ghana’s library system; Tom Feelings,  the illustrator, who taught art at the University of Cape Coast; Julia Wright (daughter of the novelist Richard Wright)  who taught French at Cape Coast; and numerous others.

The Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in Harlem

Unfortunately, their efforts to help Ghana cultivate democracy were thwarted by the dismaying autocratic and corrupt government practices. Returning to the U.S., Max established his own architectural firm, and his designs for such projects as  Columbia University’s Audubon Biomedical Science & Technology Park, in upper Manhattan; the new Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in Harlem; the Birmingham (Alabama) Civil Rights Institute in Alabama; and the Martin Luther King Jr. Center for Nonviolent Social Change in Atlanta, won notable plaudits.

Max Bond’s innovativeness was visible, too, in his teaching.  He was a professor of architecture at Columbia University for 16 years, serving part of that time as the Architecture Department’s chairman.  Later,  he was Dean of the School of Architecture at the City College of New York. Thus, for more than two decades Max taught a diverse group of students and mentored a generation of African-American and Latino-American architects. His work in that touched my family directly: both my nephew, Thomas Kilson Queenan, and one of my sons-in-law, Philip Page, benefited from Max’s example and sage advice.

Thus, the passing of J. Max Bond, Jr.  brought to a close the life of wisdom, boldness and style of an exemplary African-American professional. Let us hope that his spirit, forged in the crucible of an extraordinary African-American family, continues to illuminate the path to the future those of us left behind must take.

Martin L. Kilson, Jr. is Frank G. Thomson Professor of Government Emeritus at Harvard University.