John Anderson Lankford

John Anderson Lankford was born on the fourth of December 1874 at Potosi, Missouri — a lead-mining town of the south-eastern Missouri Ozark — the son of John W. Lankford, a labourer, and Mary Trimble Lankford. He was raised in the small Black community of the Potosi mining belt and educated at the Lincoln Institute at Jefferson City, Missouri — the historically Black state college of Missouri — completing the bachelor’s degree there in 1898.

He took graduate study at the Tuskegee Institute under Robert R. Taylor (placed in this archive) from 1898 to 1900 and at the Shaw University at Raleigh, North Carolina, from 1900 to 1902, completing the Bachelor of Civil Engineering there in 1902.

He was registered in 1902 as the first African American architect of the District of Columbia by examination of the District Board of Examiners — the first such registration ever issued in the District.

He opened the Lankford Architectural Office at the True Reformer Building at U Street and 12th Street in Northwest Washington in 1902. The firm was the principal Black-owned architectural firm of the District for the following three decades.

He was named in 1908 supervising architect of the African Methodist Episcopal Church — the principal Black-led Methodist denomination of the United States — and held the position for the following twenty-five years until 1933. He designed in the position over fifty AME church buildings across the American South, the District of Columbia, and the Mid-Atlantic between 1908 and 1933.

He designed in 1922 the rebuilding of Big Bethel AME Church on Auburn Avenue at Atlanta — the mother church of the AME denomination in Georgia and one of the principal Black-Atlanta institutional buildings of the period.

He designed additionally the True Reformer Building at U Street and 12th Street, Northwest Washington (1903) — the first major building in the District designed, built, financed, and occupied entirely by African Americans — and the Saint Paul AME Church at Raleigh, North Carolina (1909).

He died at Washington on the eighteenth of August 1946, at seventy-one.

He is honored here as the architect of the African Methodist Episcopal Church.