"That [Most] Exceptional One": Early Black Female Architects
By Kate Reggev
In her lively (and sometimes provocative) book Where Are the Women Architects?, author Despina Stratigakos notes that “ the number of women working as architects remains stubbornly low” while “law and medicine, two equally demanding and traditionally male professions, have been much more successful in retaining and integrating women.” The first time I read that, I found myself nodding in agreement, and wondering along with Stratigakos when she asked, “So why do women still struggle to keep a toehold in architecture?”
The suggestion made it seem as though other professions — in particular better-paid ones (sigh) like law and medicine — had figured it all out and had solved their equity issues, at least in terms of gender representation. And I had assumed that these other professions had also resolved issues of racial representation when it came to women in their respective fields, but I recently learned (thanks this episode of the fantastic podcast The United States of Anxiety) how very wrong I am: fewer than 2% of practicing physicians are Black women, not too far off from architecture, where .4% of registered architects are Black women (even with the recent announcement that there are now officially 500 Black female architects currently living - woohoo!).
And while this is some progress (that number was under 200 back in 2007) and there has been an increasing acknowledgement of the significant work and impact of Black architects thanks to various efforts by organizations, schools, media, and more, I’m also always looking back to the past and asking: Who have we forgotten? What projects have not received the attention and accolades they are due? What issues, hardships, and decisions did they face? And ultimately, what can we learn from history? As Victoria Rosner, a professor at Columbia, stated during a recent lecture on Beverly L. Greene and Norma Merrick Sklarek (more on them both later!), “History has to be one of our best guides to the future.”
So, then, who were some of the earliest Black women in architecture? As landscape architect and author Dreck Spurlock Wilson points out in his invaluable African American Architects : A Biographical Dictionary, 1865-1945, African American architects have been designing and building houses and public buildings since 1865 (not to mention the countless enslaved involved in the physical labor of constructing buildings like the White House).
Norma Merrick Sklarek, copyright Gruen Associates.
But a careful read of his book belies the truth: that even among this outstanding compendium of 160+ African American architects, a mere nine (nine!! That’s a just over 5%!) of these entries are women: Elizabeth Carter Brooks (1867-1951), Georgia Louise Harris Brown (1909-c. 1940), Mary Ramsay Channel Brown (1907-2006), Martha Ann Cassell Thompson (1925 -1968), Alberta Jeannette Cassell Butler (sister of Martha, 1926-2007), Alma Fairfax Murray Carlisle (1927-), Ethel Madison Bailey Furman (1893-1976), Beverly Loraine Greene (1915-1957), and Helen Eugenia Parker (1909-c. 1940). Other early Black female architects not included in the book but more than worthy of recognition include Amaza Lee Meredith (1895–1984), Norma Merrick Sklarek (1926-2012), and Sharon Egretta Sutton (1941-).
Few as they may be, these women — along with their designs, ideas, and even just their mere presence — represented an immense willpower to overcome the many challenges that they faced. What, you may wonder, were their lives and built work like?
Elizabeth Carter Brooks, courtesy of the New Bedford Historical Society.
Let’s start with a little bit about their backgrounds: these women ranged from the children of former slaves (like Elizabeth Carter Brooks, the daughter of a former slave to President William Harrison Tyler) to the daughters of immigrants (like Norma Merrick Sklarek, whose parents had emigrated from Trinidad to New York); they grew up as far north as New Bedford, Massachusetts, a town known as a refuge for freed slaves and an important stop on the Underground Railroad (Brooks again), as far south as Portsmouth, Virginia (Mary Ramsay Channel Brown), and as far west as Topeka, Kansas (Georgia Louise Harris Brown).
Amaza Lee Meredith, courtesy of the New York State Historic Preservation Office.
Some became interested in architecture because their father was an architect (like Martha Anne Cassel Thompson and Alberta Jeannette Cassell, daughters of prominent Washington, DC-based architect Albert Cassell) or real estate (Alma Fairfax Carlisle) or construction (Ethel Madison Bailey, Helen Eugenia Parker, and Amaza Lee Meredith, whose father was a master stair builder). In general, most came from a family of some means where education was valued; the father of Beverly Loraine Greene, for example, was a lawyer, and the father of Georgia Louise Harris Brown was shipping clerk, while her mother was a school teacher who also studied classical music. Even the mother of Elizabeth Carter Brooks was educated, having been sent north to Massachusetts by her master for school before the Civil War, according to African American Architects : A Biographical Dictionary, 1865-1945.
1948 Cornell yearbook page for the Alpha Alpha Gamma sorority for women in architecture. Two members were Alberta and Martha Cassell.
So what else did these women have in common? Virtually all of them expressed early interest and abilities in academics, most often art and mathematics, but frequently encountered roadblocks during their education and early career either due to their race, gender, or both (no surprise there!). Mary Brown Channel, for example, first received a bachelor’s degree in mathematics at Randolph-Macon Women’s College in 1929 and wanted to follow in the footsteps of her older brother and study architecture at the University of Virginia; however, she was denied entry because of her gender (not her race, it’s interesting to note), and instead attended Cornell University, graduating in 1933. While some attended and later worked in segregated environments like Helen Eugenia Parker, who attended a segregated public elementary school in Little Rock, Arkansas and later returned to the same city for a short time to work at a segregated library, others were pioneers of early integration. Beverly Loraine Greene, for example, graduated from the racially integrated University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 1936 with a bachelor’s degree in architectural engineering – the first Black woman to earn a degree there.
One of the most fascinating and inspiring things I’ve noticed about these women’s careers is how they, unlike many of their white female counterparts, often defied the expectation that women could only work on residential projects (the de facto building type for women, because of their supposed “intimate knowledge” of the domestic sphere). These early Black female architects often worked on large-scale, complex projects in the public realm, designing hospitals, corporate headquarters, shopping centers, skyscrapers, religious buildings, and more. Helen Eugenia Parker, for example, was an associate architect for Trinity Hospital in Detroit, a hospital founded in the 1930s to treat Black patients and employ and train Black doctors; Beverly Loraine Greene worked for some of the most established architects in the United States including Edward Durell Stone and Marcel Breuer on higher education, theater, and civic projects. In Washington, DC, Massachusetts-based Elizabeth Carter Brooks oversaw the design and construction of the Phyllis Wheatley YMCA in 1918-1920; several decades later in the 1960s, Martha Cassell Thompson became the chief restoration architect for the National Cathedral in Washington, DC thanks to her expertise on Gothic architecture.
Preliminary Study for Virginia Electric Power Company Building in Portsmouth, VA Portsmouth, VA. Mary Brown Channel Architectural Collection, Virginia Tech Special Collections and University Archive.
In terms of architectural style, too, they were often pushing the envelope. Amaza Lee Meredith’s first design, for example, was her own home and studio that she shared with her partner Dr. Edna Meade Colson. The residence, completed in 1939 and called Azurest South, is an astonishing, compact Streamline Moderne building of complex volumes on the campus of Virginia State University.
And finally, it goes almost without saying that virtually all of these trailblazing women had experience being the first in one, if not many senses: of being the first Black woman to earn her degree from her university (like Georgia Louise Harris Brown at the University of Kansas; Elizabeth Carter Brooks at the Harrington Normal School for Teachers; Alma Fairfax Carlisle at Howard University, where she was the first female to graduate with a B. Arch degree in 1950); the first woman to receive a specific award (like Mary Ramsay Channel Brown, the first woman to receive the Baird Prize Competition Medal at Cornell University); the first licensed African American woman architect in the United States (Beverly Loraine Greene, in the State of Illinois in 1942); or the first Black woman to become a member of the AIA College of Fellows (FAIA) in 1980 (Norma Merrick Sklarek — who later said, “Fellowship is a sexist title, but I’ll take it!”).
Their careers were studded with these types of superlatives that are both inspiring yet grim, heartening yet reflective of their times. It’s no coincidence that it wasn’t until World War II – a time when employment finally started to open up to women because of the war effort – that a Black woman became a licensed architect. If, as architect Pietro Belluschi stated, a woman in architecture was considered “that exceptional one,” then these early Black female architects must have been “that most exceptional one.” One imagines the hardships that these “firsts” endured – as African Americans and as women, but also as wives, mothers, and more in the world of architecture, trying to fit it all in. “It was hard,” admitted Sklarek in an oral history on being a working, single mother in the 1950s in New York City. When asked about any racism or prejudice that she might have incurred in the workplace after moving from New York to California to work at the firm of Victor Gruen Associates, she remarked that “At that time, I was used to oppression... and didn’t even acknowledge or recognize it.” She just, she said, kept on going — and, we note, paved the way for hundreds of others along the way.
Want to read, listen, or learn more? Here’s what we referenced to research this piece:
Dreck Spurlock Wilson. African American Architects : A Biographical Dictionary, 1865-1945. Routledge, 2004.
Oral History with Normal Merrick Sklarek through the National Visionary Project
Pioneering Women of American Architecture
Paul A. Wellington. Black Built: History and Architecture in the Black Community.