By any measure, the accomplishments of trailblazing architect Paul Williams are astounding. In a career spanning almost six decades, Williams broke racial barriers, becoming the first African American member (and later, Fellow) of the American Institute of Architects (AIA), while also designing more than 3,000 structures and mastering a range of architectural styles.

The Commercial Design Award of Excellence is awarded for the restoration of the Golden State Mutual Life Insurance Building in Los Angeles, California. At its completion, both the building and its architect, Paul Revere Williams, were central to the African-American community during the previous century and influenced the history of Southern California. For much of the 20th century Golden State Mutual Life Insurance was the largest black-owned insurance company in the western United States and the first in the region to write insurance policies to all people regardless of color. The company was a pillar of the African-American community, providing hundreds of African-Americans and other minorities stable, middle-class employment, and was front and center in the drive for civil rights as the site of numerous voter drives and community organization efforts, including a visit by Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. The interiors have been restored to match the original 1949 design, and the building now serves the community as a center of the South Central Los Angeles Regional Center (“SCLARC”) campus. The property is listed on the National Register and as a Historic Cultural Monument in the City of Los Angeles.

Ethel Bailey Furman is considered the earliest known African-American female architect in Virginia. When Furman began her career as an architect, city administrators, and the architecture community, "refused to accept her as the architect of record" on any projects she designed. This discrimination forced Furman to ask male contractors to sign her proposed designs and submit them for approval. Although Furman designed over two hundred churches and residences in Virginia, the vast majority of her work has been demolished, and only a fraction survives, including two churches in the Republic of Liberia.

Located in Richmond, Virginia, the Educational Building expansion of the Greek Revival-style Fourth Baptist Church was designed by Ethel B. Forman in a Modernist style in 1962. It was added to the National Register of Historic Places as part of the Church Hill North Historic District extension in 2000.

J. Max Bond Jr., (1935-2009) was born in Louisville, Kentucky to a distinguished Black family. He was inspired to become an architect by a staircase that fascinated him at Tuskegee Institute and by architecture he saw in Tunisia as a boy, both places where his father taught. He received a a Masters in Architecture in 1958 from Harvard and despite facing racism throughout his career, he became one of the most prominent architects in the country.

A division of the New York Public Library, The Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture in Harlem is one of the world’s leading cultural institutions devoted to the research, preservation, and exhibition of materials focused on African American, African Diaspora, and African experiences. 

Originally established within the 135th Street Branch of the NY Public Library (1905), a Carnegie library designed by McKim, Mead & White, the Schomburg Center was greatly expanded with the construction of an adjacent new Modern building designed by J. Max Bond, Jr. of Bond Ryder Associates, completed in 1980. 

During a period when the project had been temporarily cancelled due to lack of funds, Ada Louise Huxtable wrote “Bond, Ryder came up with a very good scheme. First, they had changed the program they were given from a large demolition and rebuilding project to something far more sensitive and sensible by calculating the future maintenance and staffing cost for what would have been an overambitious museum and library combination. They cut down the museum space and suggested that the McKim, Mead and White building be saved and recycled for the art and artifacts displays.” Huxtable concluded, “It is a simple, rational design, rich in neighborhood amenity, at once economical and potentially elegant.”

Norma Merrick Sklarek's life was full of firsts: she was the first African American woman to be a licensed woman architect in New York and California; to be a member of AIA and elected to the College of Fellows; and to co-own an architectural firm.

Arthur Silvers was a partner of Kennard and Silvers, the first Black architecture firm in Los Angeles. He was from a generation of post World War II architects whose work demonstrated a break from traditional European influences. Silvers and Kennard were modernists -- influenced by Richard Neutra and Victor Gruen. Silvers was the Historian and Parliamentarian for the National Organization of Minority Architects (NOMA) in the 1970s. He and Kennard attended the USC School of Architecture and were both members of Scarab (Architecture Fraternity). (Source: LA Conservancy)

Robert Alexander Kennard, FAIA, was born in Los Angeles and founded his firm here in 1957. He began with residential design and completed some 40 residences through the early 1960s. One of his first homes, the Zeiger Residence, has been designated as a City of Los Angeles Cultural-Historic Monument. But in the mid-1960s he shifted his practice to public work.

Designed by architects Robert Kennard and Arthur "Art" Silvers and completed in 1969, this Late Modern, two-story T-shaped building has cultivated Black art, culture, and local activism in the Watts community. The center has been a prominent hub for Black artists, writers, musicians, filmmakers, and poets. (Source: LA Conservancy)

John Moutoussamy is best known as the designer of the Johnson Publishing Company Building, the only high-rise office building in downtown Chicago with an African American client (publishing titan John H. Johnson, whose growing media empire included Ebony and Jet magazines) and architect (Moutoussamy). Moutoussamy was the first black architect to become a partner in a major firm, Dubin Dubin Black & Moutoussamy.

African American architect John Moutoussamy designed this house for his own family in 1954. The house is located in Chatham, an upper middle-class neighborhood that became popular in the 1950s and 1960s with Chicago’s African American economic and cultural elite.

Amaza Lee Meredith was a trailblazing African American architect, educator, and artist. Prohibited from receiving formal training as a professional architect, because of "both her race and her sex," Meredith worked around those societal restrictions. She founded the art department at Virginia State College for Negroes [now Virginia State University] and designed many of the houses of her family and friends. Her resilience came to fruition in 1938 when she designed her most renowned structure, Azurest South.

Azurest South is a compact but articulate example of the International Style located adjacent to the campus of Virginia State University. Designed in 1938 by Amaza Lee Meredith as a residence for herself and her partner, Dr. Edna Meade Colson and completed in 1939. Built of concrete block rendered in white-panted stucco, the flat-roofed. one-story structure exhibits the smooth, clean lines associated with its style. Crisp, geometric forms are set off by a lush landscaped setting - a sloping grassy dell surrounded by mature trees. The structure is connected to the surrounding garden through a series of curving pipe rails and by the extending, corrugated roof of the open carport. Distinguishing features of the house are the asymmetrical massing, the curved comers accentuated by narrow bands of glass-block, and the complete lack of applied ornament. Details and finishes designed by Meredith survive mostly intact. Meredith's interior design evokes the Art Deco style and is characterized by dramatic use of color, vivid patterning of walls, floors and ceilings, and the use of inventive lighting fixtures. The house functioned in part as a design laboratory and studio. so its appearance evolved subtly over the years, reflecting her studies of color and material. The most significant changes to the house occurred in the 1950s when the garage was converted to a studio, the carport added, and the kitchen entry infilled with corrugated fiberglass walls. The building now serves as the Virginia State University Alumni House.

Excerpted from the Azurest South National Register Nomination

Norcell Haywood was the first licensed African American architect in San Antonio and championed the concept of the "community architect."

Beverly Lorraine Greene is believed to have been the first African American woman licensed to practice architecture in the United States. Born in Chicago, she graduated from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and was one of the first few African Americans to work for the Chiago Housing Authority. She became a licensed architect in 1942 and later collaborated with architects such as Edward Durell Stone and Marcel Breuer, among others.

Nathan Johnson was born in 1926 in Herington, Kansas. He came to Detroit to work as a draftsman for White and Griffin before forming his own firm in 1956. He pursued an adventurous modern style in church architecture with some of Detroit’s most historic black faith communities. By 1963, an article in the Detroit Free Press reported that he “has built or is planning a dozen churches.” Articulating the modernist underpinning of his work, Johnson says in the same article, “We try to be honest. If we want to decorate a church, we let the structure do it instead of applying ornaments.”

In 1948, Alberta Jeannette Charlotte Cassell was one of the first African American women to graduate from Cornell University’s School of Architecture – her sister Martha Ann was the second. The daughter of prominent architect, Albert Cassell, she worked with his firm and later had a successful career as an architectural engineer for the United States Navy.

David Carold Sharpe was an African American architect and academic, who spent the majority of his career as a designer for Skidmore, Owings & Merrill (SOM). At SOM, Sharpe contributed to some of the firm's most significant large-scale projects, and rose to become an associate partner. Sharpe received his Bachelor of Architecture in 1960 and Master of Science in Architecture in 1962 from the Illinois Institute of Technology (IIT), where he became a protégé of Mies van der Rohe. While working at SOM, he began teaching architecture part-time at IIT’s College of Architecture - it would later become his full-time career. He was the school’s first African American professor.

Georgia Louise Harris Brown was born in Kansas in 1918. She excelled in school and graduated from the University of Kansas in 1944. She also attended classes at IIT. She worked in the office of black architect and structural engineer Kenneth Roderick O’Neal and later for Kornacker Associates. In the 1950s, seeking to advance her career free of racism and sexism, she moved to Brazil, where she worked on a number of high profile public commissions as well as many private residences. Brown asserted that she never thought of herself as having been a black pioneer female architect, but simply an architect.

During the first half of the twentieth century, Hilyard Robert Robinson was one of the most prolific and socially conscious African American architects in the nation. His public housing designs were so effective in addressing the need of its inhabitants that they became one of the catalysts which encouraged the Roosevelt Administration to pass the first national housing act.

Leon Quincy Jackson was a notable African American architect and professor who built a number of private homes and civic buildings in Oklahoma and Tennessee in the modern style. Jackson earned an architecture degree from Kansas State University and a master’s in urban planning from the University of Oklahoma, where he studied under renowned architect Bruce Goff. In 1950, Jackson became the first African American architect to open an office in Oklahoma. While relying on his Kansas license, state officials made him withdraw his listing as an architect because he was not licensed in the state even though he had obtained an architecture degree from the state university.

Robert Coles (1930-2020) was a trailblazing Buffalo architect and the first African American chancellor of the AIA’s College of Fellows. He battled racial discrimination throughout his career, leading him to commit to "an architecture of social conscience" and making his profession "look more like the society it has to serve." His continual goal was to create more humane, inspiring urban spaces. His buildings ranged from small, residential structures to major, public, developments.

Roger Williams Margerum was an African American architect who worked primarily in Michigan. Margerum's designs were like architectural Rubik's cubes — midcentury modern structures twisted into geometric shapes that are visual delights. In 1984, Margerum became an American Institute of Architects Fellow, the AIA's highest membership honor, for his exceptional work and contributions to architecture and society.

Robert (Bob) Prince Madison is the first registered African American architect in Ohio and established his firm on July 17, 1954, two months to the day after the Brown vs. Board of Education decision where the U.S. Supreme court unanimously ruled that racial segregation in public schools was unconstitutional. Madison’s enduring designs have become a part of the state’s iconography and the city of Cleveland’s best expressions of itself.