Moses McKissack III

Moses McKissack III was born on the twenty-eighth of January 1879 at Pulaski, Tennessee, the son of Moses McKissack II — a master carpenter and a former enslaved Pulaski Methodist Episcopal church-builder freed at the close of the Civil War — and Miriam McKissack. He was raised in the McKissack family carpentry yard at Pulaski.

He was apprenticed at fourteen in 1893 to his father in the family carpentry business and worked the residential carpentry of Giles County for the following ten years. He took the architectural correspondence course of the International Correspondence Schools of Scranton, Pennsylvania, between 1895 and 1905 — at the time the principal route into the practice for Black carpentry apprentices in the Jim Crow South.

He registered the M. McKissack Building Construction Company at Nashville in 1905 — the company that built across the following fifteen years the residential and small institutional buildings of the Black Nashville community of the early twentieth century.

He entered partnership in 1922 with his younger brother Calvin Lunsford McKissack (placed in this archive) — who had taken the Bachelor of Architecture at the Pratt Institute at Brooklyn in 1922 — in the firm of McKissack & McKissack at Nashville. The firm was the first African American–owned and African American–operated architectural firm of the state of Tennessee and is the oldest continuously operating African American–owned architectural firm in the United States.

The McKissack & McKissack firm designed across the inter-war and war period over five thousand buildings — among them the Carnegie Library at the Fisk University (1908), the Morrison Hall of the Tennessee Agricultural and Industrial State Normal College (1923), the women’s residence halls of the Tennessee A. & I. State University (1926), the United States Army Air Forces flight-training facility at Tuskegee Army Air Field (1942), and the principal residences of the Black professional Nashville of the 1930s and 1940s.

He died at Nashville on the twenty-eighth of December 1952 of a heart attack, at seventy-three.

He is honored here as the co-founder of McKissack & McKissack.