Phil Freelon

Philip Goodwin Freelon was born on the twenty-sixth of March 1953 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, into a family of artists, educators, and inventors. His father, Allan Randall Freelon, was a sales and marketing executive; his mother, Elizabeth Neal Freelon, was an educator. He grew in the shadow of his grandfather, the Harlem Renaissance painter Allan Randall Freelon Sr., whose devotion to creative expression awakened in the boy a lifelong love of art, music, and the built world.

After studies at Hampton University, Freelon transferred to North Carolina State University's College of Design, earning his degree in environmental design in 1975, and completed a Master of Architecture at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1977. Precocious in his craft, he became the youngest person to pass North Carolina's Architecture Registration Exam, at the age of twenty-five, and later held a Loeb Fellowship at Harvard's Graduate School of Design.

In 1990 he founded The Freelon Group in Durham, North Carolina, which grew into one of the nation's most respected practices and, in time, the largest African American–led architecture firm in the country. He devoted his gifts to institutions of memory and dignity — libraries, cultural centers, and museums of the Black experience. His crowning work came in 2009, when his team won the commission to design the Smithsonian's National Museum of African American History and Culture, opened on the National Mall in 2016, its bronze corona rising in quiet defiance among the white marble.

Diagnosed with ALS in 2016, he continued to design and to teach until his death in Durham on the ninth of July 2019, at the age of sixty-six. He built houses of remembrance so that a people's story might stand in stone and light — and in doing so, made himself a monument to the dignity he honored.