Howard Hamilton Mackey Sr.

Howard Hamilton Mackey Sr. was born on the twenty-fifth of November 1901 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, the son of Henry Bardon Mackey, a butler, and Anna Willis Mackey, a domestic worker. From this working household in South Philadelphia he rose through the city's public schools, graduating from South Philadelphia High School and then earning his bachelor of architecture in 1924 from the University of Pennsylvania's School of Architecture.

That same year, 1924, he joined the faculty of Howard University in Washington, D.C., beginning a devotion to the institution that would span nearly half a century. Named acting head of the Department of Architecture in 1929, he later took a sabbatical to pursue graduate study at the University of Pennsylvania and returned to serve as associate professor and associate dean. Under his patient leadership the program he once knew as a class of three students grew into a body of more than one hundred and sixty drawn from across the world.

Mackey's greatest institutional achievement was guiding Howard University to become the first historically Black college or university with an accredited architecture program, and he retired in 1973 as dean of its School of Architecture and Planning. In 1962 he was elevated to the College of Fellows of the American Institute of Architects — only the second African American so honored, after Paul R. Williams — and in 1983 he received the Whitney M. Young Jr. Award. Colleagues came to call him "the Father of Black architects."

He died on the twentieth of August 1987 in Washington, D.C. Through the doors he opened and the generations of architects he taught, Howard Hamilton Mackey Sr. built not only buildings but builders — and his honored name endures in the very halls where he taught.