Walter T. Bailey

Walter Thomas Bailey was born on the eleventh of January 1882 at Kewanee, Illinois, the son of Emanuel Bailey — a coal miner — and Sarah Hudson Bailey, a domestic worker. He was raised in the small Black community of the central Illinois coal-mining belt and educated at the Kewanee public schools.

He enrolled in 1900 at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in the four-year course of architecture under Nathan Clifford Ricker — the founder of the Illinois School of Architecture — and completed the Bachelor of Science in Architecture in 1904 as the first African American graduate of the school. He took the Master of Architecture at the same school in 1910 — the first African American graduate of an American Master of Architecture programme.

He was hired in 1905 by Booker T. Washington (placed in this archive) as the assistant to Robert R. Taylor (placed in this archive) in the Department of Mechanical Industries at the Tuskegee Institute, and succeeded Taylor as the head of the department in 1906 when Taylor took the second of his Tuskegee absences. He served at Tuskegee from 1905 to 1916.

He opened his own practice at Memphis, Tennessee in 1916, the office that designed across the following five years the Knights of Pythias temples of Birmingham (1916), Memphis (1918) and Chicago (1928). He moved the practice to Chicago in 1924.

He designed the Knights of Pythias National Temple at 3737 South State Street, Chicago — the eight-story office tower of the principal Black fraternal order of the period — completed in 1928 and at the time of completion the tallest Black-designed Black-owned building in the United States. He designed additionally the First Church of Deliverance at 4315 South Wabash Avenue, Chicago (1939).

He died at Chicago on the twenty-first of February 1941 of a stroke, at fifty-nine.

He is honored here as the first African American Master of Architecture graduate.