Robert R. Taylor

Robert Robinson Taylor was born on the eighth of June 1868 at Wilmington, North Carolina, the son of Henry Taylor — a formerly enslaved carpenter and contractor of the Wilmington shipbuilding district who had bought his freedom in 1859 — and Emily Still Taylor. He was raised in the family carpentry shop on Princess Street and educated at the Wilmington Coloured Schools and at the Lincoln Academy at Kings Mountain.

He was admitted at twenty in 1888 to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the four-year course of architecture under Eugene Letang and Constant-Désiré Despradelle — among the first African American students admitted to MIT — and completed the Bachelor of Science in Architecture in 1892 as the first African American graduate of MIT in any discipline and the first accredited African American architect of the United States.

He was hired in November 1892 by Booker T. Washington (placed in this archive) as director of the Department of Mechanical Industries at the Tuskegee Institute at Tuskegee, Alabama. He served the Institute across two long appointments — from 1892 to 1899 and from 1902 to 1932 — and designed or oversaw the construction of over twenty-eight principal buildings of the Tuskegee campus across the forty years of his tenure.

He designed the Tuskegee Chapel (1898) — the first major American church building designed by a Black architect — the Carnegie Library (1901), the Tantum Hall (1907), the Sage Hall (1900), and the Booker T. Washington Monument (1922) on the Tuskegee campus, the Robert Russa Moton High School (1939), and the Veterans Administration Hospital (1923) at Tuskegee.

He was elected in 1935 a trustee of the Fisk University at Nashville — the first Black architect elected a trustee of a major American university.

He died at Tuskegee on the thirteenth of December 1942 of a heart attack in the Tuskegee Chapel he had designed forty-four years earlier, at seventy-four.

He is honored here as the first accredited African American architect.