William Sidney Pittman

William Sidney Pittman was born on the twenty-first of April 1875 at Montgomery, Alabama, the son of William Pittman — a Confederate veteran of the Civil War — and Martha Pittman, an emancipated woman of the Montgomery domestic-service economy. He was raised by his mother alone from infancy at the small Montgomery boarding-house she operated.

He was admitted at sixteen in 1892 to the Tuskegee Institute in Alabama, where he studied under the direction of Robert R. Taylor (placed in this archive). He completed the Tuskegee Institute mechanical-industries course in 1897 and took further training at the Drexel Institute of Art, Science and Industry at Philadelphia from 1897 to 1900, completing the architectural course in 1900.

He returned to Tuskegee in 1900 and taught architectural drawing and mechanical industries at the Institute for five years until 1905. He married Portia Marshall Washington — the eldest daughter of Booker T. Washington (placed in this archive) — on the thirty-first of October 1907 at the Washington residence at Tuskegee.

He relocated his practice to Washington, D.C. in 1905 and submitted in 1906 the winning design — across a field of fifty-three submissions — for the Negro Building of the Jamestown Tercentennial Exposition of 1907. The commission was the first federal architectural commission awarded to an African American architect.

He designed across the following twenty years over a dozen principal Black-institutional buildings — among them the Twelfth Street YMCA at Washington, D.C. (1912), the Garfield School at Washington (1908), the Saint Paul Industrial College at Lawrenceville, Virginia, and the Bay City Hotel at Bay City, Texas.

He moved his practice to Dallas, Texas in 1912 and lived there for the remaining forty-six years of his life.

He died at Dallas on the eighth of March 1958 of a heart attack at his Dallas drafting board, at eighty-two.

He is honored here as the first African American to receive a federal architectural commission.