Howard Hamilton Mackey Sr.

Howard Hamilton Mackey Sr. was born on the second of January 1901 at Pittsburgh, the son of Howard Hamilton Mackey — a Pullman porter on the Pennsylvania Railroad — and Carrie Hardin Mackey. The family migrated to Philadelphia in 1908, where he was raised in the Black North Philadelphia of the early twentieth century and educated at the Central High School.

He enrolled in 1919 at the Pennsylvania Museum School of Industrial Arts and transferred in 1921 to the University of Pennsylvania School of Architecture, completing the Bachelor of Architecture in 1924 under Paul Philippe Cret. He took graduate study at the Atelier Hirons of New York under Frederic C. Hirons in 1925 and at the École des Beaux-Arts at Paris in 1929.

He was appointed in 1924 to the faculty of the Howard University Department of Architecture under Albert I. Cassell (placed in this archive), and rose to assistant professor in 1928, full professor in 1934, and head of the department in 1939. He served the Howard architecture programme in some teaching capacity for the following fifty years until his retirement in 1970.

He was appointed in 1953 the founding dean of the Howard University School of Architecture and Planning when the department was reorganized as a free-standing school — and held the deanship for seventeen years until 1970. The school was accredited under his deanship by the National Architectural Accrediting Board in 1956 — the first accredited architectural school at a historically Black college or university.

He trained across the deanship over two-thirds of the registered Black architects of the United States of the mid-twentieth century — over four hundred individual graduates by his retirement.

He was named in 1971 one of the twelve founders of the National Organization of Minority Architects at the American Institute of Architects national convention at Detroit in October 1971, and served as the founding chair of the organization through 1973.

He died at Washington on the third of February 1987, at eighty-six.

He is honored here as the founding dean of the Howard University School of Architecture.