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.

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.

David Augustus Williston was the first professionally trained African American landscape architect in the United States. During his career, Williston was an educator and practiced landscape architecture -- as a designer and campus planner for many historically black institutions. Between the years of 1910 to 1929, Williston taught horticulture at the Tuskegee Institute, while simultaneously overseeing the development of the campus as the superintendent of buildings and grounds.

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.

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.

Harry Simmons Jr., was the founder of Simmons Architects and an associate architect for the AT&T Building in Manhattan. Mr. Simmons was known primarily for designing and rehabilitating lower- and middle-income housing that addressed the social needs of the inner city. Often, this meant keeping residential projects low to the ground, organized around a courtyard, with communal spaces and amenities to foster a sense of social cohesion.

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.

John S. Chase, FAIA (1925 - 2012) was from Baltimore, Maryland. After serving in WWII, he earned a degree in architecture from Hampton University in Virginia. He became the first registered African American Architect in Texas.

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.

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.

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.”

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.