Beverly Loraine Greene

Beverly Lorraine Greene was born on the fourth of October 1915 at Chicago, Illinois, the daughter of James A. Greene — a lawyer of the South Side of Chicago — and Vera Foster Greene, a public-school teacher. She was raised in the Black professional Bronzeville district of Chicago of the inter-war period and educated at the Englewood High School.

She enrolled in 1932 at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in the architectural-engineering course — the same school from which Walter T. Bailey (placed in this archive) had graduated twenty-eight years earlier — and completed the Bachelor of Science in Architectural Engineering in 1936 and the Master of Science in City Planning and Housing in 1937 — among the first African American women to complete an architectural Master’s degree at any American university.

She was registered in March 1942 as the first African American woman licensed architect of the state of Illinois — by examination of the Illinois Department of Registration and Education.

She was hired in 1945 by the Chicago Housing Authority as a junior architect and produced under the Authority’s post-war veterans-housing programme the studies that opened the first integrated Authority projects in the South Side.

She moved to New York in 1946 to take graduate study at the Columbia University School of Architecture, completing the Master of Architecture in 1945.

She was hired in 1949 by the architect Marcel Breuer at the Manhattan office of Breuer Associates and served as a junior associate at the firm for the following eight years until her death. She contributed during the Breuer years to the United Nations Headquarters Secretariat Building (1948–1952, in collaboration with Wallace K. Harrison, Le Corbusier, Oscar Niemeyer, and the rest of the international team), to the UNESCO Headquarters at Paris (1953–1958), and to the New York University University Heights Campus (1954–1961).

She died at New York on the twenty-second of August 1957 of cancer, at forty-one.

She is honored here as the first African American woman licensed architect.