Robert R. Taylor and Tuskegee: An African American Architect Designs for Booker T. Washington

Robert R. Taylor and Tuskegee interweaves the life of the first academically trained African American architect with his life's work - the campus of Booker T. Washington's Tuskegee Normal and Industrial Institute. In this richly illustrated architectural history, the author shows how a black youth born in North Carolina shortly after the Civil War earned a professional architecture degree at MIT and how he then used his design and administrative skills to further Booker T. Washington's agenda of community solidarity and - in defiance of the then-expanding Jim Crow policies - the public expression of racial pride and progress. The book also considers such issues as architectural education for African Americans at the turn of the 20th century, the white donors who funded Tuskegee's buildings, other Tuskegee architects, and Taylor's buildings elsewhere. Individual narratives of Taylor's Tuskegee buildings conclude the volume.