Tuskegee, Alabama, January 17, 1980
Cover of workshop syllabus, archived at the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture
August 1, 2022 marked the end of my first year working as a professor at a university. I’m still not sure whether to call myself faculty, a teacher, a professor, an academic, all of these or something else. Academic work contains many different jobs. I’m expected to be a classroom teacher, a manager of graduate assistants, a planner of curriculum, a facilitator of workshops, a connector, schemer and dreamer, and a writer. So many of those require being up and about that I’ve had some trouble making myself sit still enough to do the last job!
In a non-tenure-track position, I don’t necessarily need to keep myself to a strict writing schedule. But I believe in writing as a generative process - it’s why I’ve maintained this newsletter/blog project in some form for more than 5 years now, after all - and I want to take advantage of the academic environment to improve at this particular skill. And I may yet decide to pursue other jobs in this field after the end of this appointment. And so, I’m writing.
This semester I’ve been working, slowly, on a paper about racialized histories of design education in New Orleans, Louisiana, and the South. In an effort to kick myself into gear I’ve been pulling together primary sources.
One source I’ve enjoyed getting to know is a booklet on a planning workshop hosted at Tuskegee University in January 1980 by a group of architecture faculty who’d received a National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) grant. The group was hosted by Tuskegee’s Center for Afro American Architecture, and it was convened to explore the creation of a National Resource Center for Afro American Architecture, to be funded under a hoped-for future NEA grant.
I found this source while searching for written work by the architectural historian Dr. Richard Kenneth Dozier. Dr. Dozier earned his PhD at Michigan following undergraduate study at the Los Angeles Technical College and his recruitment into Yale’s M.Arch program through that school’s initiatives to recruit Black architects and planners during the Black Power era of the late 1960s and early 1970s (for more on this history, check out William Richards’ ‘Revolt and Reform in Architecture’s Academy’).
I have previously used in my classes an article by Dr. Dozier, ‘The Black Architectural Experience in America’, published in the AIA’s remarkable July 1976 magazine celebrating enslaver Thomas Jefferson’s plantation UVA campus as American architects’ favorite building. In that piece Dozier proposes a provocative idea: that architectural licensure itself was created at least in part to maintain the Whiteness and maleness of the profession. If accepted as truth, this idea proposes that the underrepresentation of Black Americans, specifically Black women, in the US architectural profession isn’t a bug of the education and licensure process, but a feature of that process itself. If taken logically it proposes that architectural education and licensure as we know them today must be abolished or significantly altered if we sincerely want to achieve appropriate levels of representation of Black Americans, specifically Black women, in the field.
Dr. Dozier’s work as a scholar and administrator was prolific, as attested by this resolution upon his passing authored by NOMA’s board in December 2021. One of his many accomplishments, it turns out, was playing a significant role in organizing this workshop. Thanks to some wonderful staff people and volunteers at the Smithsonian NMAAHC, this source - a typed transcript of proceedings at the workshop, along with photos - is available in full on their website. Yay for accessible archives!
What first stuck out to me about this source was the date. January 1980, days before Ronald Reagan’s inauguration as President, succeeding Jimmy Carter. I don’t know the details of Reagan’s appropriations to the NEA, but given what I know about his austerity budgeting and hostility toward anything Black in general, I know this project as the workshop’s participants envisioned it was doomed. No National Resource Center for Afro American Architecture was established at Tuskegee, or anywhere else.
My mind runs wild with the possibilities of an alternate history. What position would the histories of Black architects in the US occupy within the consciousness of educators and practitioners had this project succeeded? Would the histories I had to learn beyond the walls of my White university’s classrooms have been a part of regular curriculum there? Had Reagan not been elected in 1980, so much else would be different, too.
Back to reality: what happened at these Planning Workshops? (The source also includes information on the earlier workshops.) The series was led by architect-educator J. Max Bond, then teaching at Columbia University, and Dr. Dozier. There were four public panel discussions, and planning sessions, which ultimately determined the desired direction for the National Resource Center project: not one center, but multiple regional centers, connected with existing museums and educational institutions.
[The following are transcribed directly from the syllabus archived at the Smithsonian NMAAHC].
A Southeastern Regional Center at Tuskegee was outlined to include:
A Building Arts Museum
Archives and a research center
Publications
Preservation course work
A special six-week summer institute, offering:
Directed research and field work
Lectures and mini-courses by visiting scholars
Building documentation and restoration construction
The Center was also planned to utilize existing related courses taught throughout Tuskegee.
The Workshop #4 schedule included:
Day 1, Thursday, January 17, 1980
Viewing of videotapes of past workshops and materials
Presentations by:
Carson Anderson, University of Virginia
Herbert De Costa, Charleston, SC
Dan Dirett, MCRS, Washington, DC
Day 2, Friday, January 18, 1980
Review of Objectives
Concurrent Smaller Workshops
Summary
Details of the earlier workshops in the series:
Workshop #1, ‘History, Tradition and Directions of African American Architecture’, Tuskegee, Alabama, February 1979
Speakers:
Prof. Carl Anthony, University of California-Berkeley. ‘The Big House and the Slave Quarters’
Steve Jones, researcher, University of Pennsylvania. ‘Thomas Day, Early Free Black Craftsman - 1820-1860’
Prof. R.K. Dozier, AIA, Tuskegee. ‘History of Black Professional Architects’
Ike Foy, Architect, Philadelphia. ‘[No title]’. Mr. Foy spoke about how African forms have influenced American architects.
Prof. J. Max Bond, AIA, New York architect, Columbia University. ‘[No title]’. Prof. Bond spoke about the relationship of architecture to culture, power and one’s position in a society.
Workshop #2, ‘Afro-American Environmental Arts: Relationships and Research’, University of Texas at Austin, March 23-24, 1979
Day 1, March 23, 1979
Speakers:
Welcome, Prof. Harold Box, AIA, Dean, School of Architecture
Prof. Everett Fly, School of Architecture, University of Texas, introducing Prof. Richard K. Dozier, AIA, Tuskegee
Remarks, Dr. John Warfield, Director, Afro-American Studies, University of Texas
Dr. John Vlatch, Anthropologist & Historian, ‘African Architecture: Need for a Historical Perspective’
Prof. Gregory Peniston, Tuskegee, ‘Towards a History and Theory of Black Architecture’
Mr. Stan Britt, AIA, principal, Sulton & Campbell Architects (now Sulton Campbell Britt), Baltimore. ‘Traditional Architecture of East Africa: Slides of Villages in Kenya, Tanzania and Uganda’
Dr. Ada Simond, former educator and dedicated historian and author, ‘An Exhibit and Discussion of the Average Black Family in Austin, TX at the Turn of the Century’
Donna Rodgers, Curator, ‘Arts & Crafts of the Kuba’, University of Texas Art Gallery
Day 2, March 24, 1979
Open Panel Discussion on Four Issues Relating to Establishing an Archive of African American Architecture. Moderated by Prof. LaBarbara Fly, University of Texas
Identification of scholars currently engaged in research, design or related areas of Afro-American Architecture
Development of an atmosphere for cooperation, coordination and dissemination of research
What medium to communicate to people?
Form, content and location of an archive.
Panelists:
Dr. John Vlatch: currently completing a manuscript on Phillip Simmons, South Carolina Blacksmith
Mr. Stan Britt: Architect, Baltimore, MD
Prof. Gregory Peniston: Tuskegee
Prof. Everett Fly: Conducting field studies of Black settlements in US
Prof. C. Levonne Laughinghouse: Southern University, Baton Rouge, LA
Prof. Richard K. Dozier, Tuskegee
Dr. Mel Wade: Completing research on Traditional Agricultural Practices of Black Farmers of East Texas. University of Texas
There is no information given about Workshop #3 - where or when or whether it happened. If it did happen, it would have taken place between March 1979 and January 1980.
Reading about all these people coming together, and what they talked about, makes me both grateful and indignant. I am so glad to know more about the wealth of knowledge, and all the knowledgeable people, whose efforts laid the foundations of later research, teaching & convening around Black architecture history in the US and around the world. In college I encountered a couple of remarkable books - ‘White Papers, Black marks: architecture, race, culture’, edited by Lesley Lokko, published in 2000; and ‘Space Unveiled: invisible cultures in the design studio’, edited by Carla Jackson Bell, published in 2016. The essays by the authors in these books represented the architectural, history, theory and pedagogy of a generation built on the work of these late-70s and early 80s scholars.
Since 2020, Dr. Bell has been dean of the Robert R. Taylor School of Architecture and Construction Sciences at Tuskegee, where she began her undergraduate studies in 1984, only 5 years after the conclusion of this workshop series. That’s as far in the past for her then as my own graduation from architecture school is for me now - in terms of academic genealogy, not very long at all. In other words, some of the people whose research and writing were major influences on me, were themselves significantly influenced by the people who ran these workshops in 1979 and 1980. (Longtime readers may remember that JAWS*2 takes its name from JAWS, the Jazz Architecture Work Shop, a 1993 conference hosted by Prof. Nathaniel Q. Belcher at the Tulane School of Architecture, which I learned about because he wrote a chapter in Dr. Bell’s book about it.)
My indignance comes as I recognize yet again how little of this was ever taught to me. That Dr. Ada Simond, a speaker at the second workshop - hosted in Austin, Texas, the city where I grew up, wrote entire children’s books about the Black history of my hometown, and I have never heard of her. That virtually all the stories of 1960s and 70s architectural activism I’ve heard of to this point were about Black practitioners in the North, or White practitioners all over the country. These stories were not about the practitioners who attended these workshops, most of whom are Black, who are mostly from or working in the South, especially the two states where I’ve lived and one of the states my people come from - Texas, Louisiana and Alabama.
Most of all, I’m indignant that White professors at White institutions like the Tulane School of Architecture can operate as if Black people never existed, have no architecture, create no institutions and trace no history. As if nobody, Black or White, has been working diligently to document and celebrate spatial practices of freedom for generations.
Not for no reason did bell hooks urge us to ‘document a cultural genealogy of resistance’ in ‘Black Vernacular: Architecture as Cultural Practice’. And so, I’m writing.