John Saunders Chase

John Saunders Chase was born on the twenty-third of January 1925 at Annapolis, Maryland, the son of John H. Chase — a Pullman porter on the Baltimore & Ohio Railroad — and Lula Smith Chase. He was raised in the small Black community of the Annapolis waterman district and educated at the Bates High School at Annapolis.

He served the United States Army during the closing year of the European war in the 92nd Infantry Division. He returned to Annapolis in 1945 and enrolled at the Hampton Institute on the G.I. Bill, completing the Bachelor of Architecture there in 1948.

He was admitted in 1950 to the University of Texas School of Architecture at Austin — under the federal-court desegregation order in the Sweatt v. Painter decision of the United States Supreme Court of the prior year — as the first African American graduate student in the architecture programme. He completed the Master of Architecture there in 1952.

He was registered in 1952 as the first African American architect of the state of Texas — the first Black architectural registration ever issued by the Texas State Board of Architectural Examiners. He opened his own practice at Houston in 1953 — the John S. Chase Office of Architecture — and served the Houston Black community from the practice for the following sixty years.

He designed across the following sixty years over a hundred and fifty principal buildings of the Houston Black community and the Texas historically Black colleges — among them the David Adickes residence at Houston (1962), the George I. Sanchez School of Architecture at Texas Southern University (1969), and the Riverside Hospital expansion at Houston (1957).

He was named in 1971 one of the twelve founding members of the National Organization of Minority Architects at the American Institute of Architects national convention at Detroit in October 1971, alongside Howard Hamilton Mackey Sr. (placed in this archive) and Wendell Campbell (placed in this archive).

He was the first African American member of the American Institute of Architects Board of Directors in 1980 and the first African American Fellow of the AIA from Texas in 1977.

He died at Houston on the twenty-ninth of March 2012, at eighty-seven.

He is honored here as the first African American architect of Texas.