Calvin McKissack

Calvin Lunsford McKissack was born on the eighth of August 1890 at Pulaski, Tennessee — the same Giles County master-carpentry household as his elder brother Moses McKissack III (placed in this archive) — the son of Moses McKissack II and Miriam McKissack. He was raised in the same McKissack family carpentry yard at Pulaski and worked the family carpentry through his teens.

He enrolled in 1909 at the Fisk University at Nashville and completed the bachelor’s in 1913. He took architectural drawing at the Pratt Institute of Brooklyn from 1916 to 1922 — interrupted by United States Army service from 1917 to 1919 at the 805th Pioneer Infantry Regiment of the 92nd Infantry Division — and completed the Bachelor of Architecture at Pratt in 1922.

He was registered in 1924 as the first African American architect of the state of Tennessee — by examination of the Tennessee State Board of Examiners for Architects and Engineers.

He entered partnership with his elder brother Moses in 1922 in the firm of McKissack & McKissack at Nashville, and served as the chief design partner of the firm for the following forty-six years until his death in 1968.

He taught architecture at the Tennessee Agricultural and Industrial State Normal College — subsequently Tennessee State University — at Nashville from 1925 to 1955 and founded the Tennessee State University Department of Architecture in 1951 as the first African American department of architecture in the public-university system of the American South.

He was named in 1941 by the United States War Department the architect of the Tuskegee Army Air Field at Tuskegee — the training base of the Tuskegee Airmen — under a $5.7 million federal contract that was at the time the largest single federal architectural contract ever awarded to an African American–owned firm.

He designed additionally the Capers Memorial CME Church at Nashville (1928), the West Tennessee Vocational School at Memphis (1937), and the Pearl High School at Nashville (1937).

He died at Nashville on the seventh of December 1968 of a heart attack, at seventy-eight.

He is honored here as the architect of the Tuskegee Army Air Field.