Moses McKissack III

Moses McKissack III was born on the eighth of May 1879 in Pulaski, Giles County, Tennessee, into a family in which the building trade was a living inheritance. His grandfather — the first Moses McKissack, born about 1790 and of Ashanti origin — had been enslaved to a white builder named William McKissack, who taught him the craft; he became a master builder. That knowledge passed to his son, Gabriel Moses McKissack (1840–1922), a builder born into freedom, and then to a third generation.

Trained through apprenticeship and study, the younger Moses learned architectural drawing and pursued instruction, in part through correspondence, at a time when the profession was all but closed to Black Americans. From 1905 he ran his own practice, the McKissack Company, working across Tennessee and Alabama; among its early commissions was the Carnegie Library at Fisk University.

In 1922, joined by his brother Calvin Lunsford McKissack, he founded the firm of McKissack & McKissack in Nashville — recognized as the first professional architectural firm owned by African Americans, and among the oldest still in practice. In 1942 the firm won a federal contract to design and build the air base at Tuskegee, Alabama, home of the Tuskegee Airmen — then the largest federal contract ever awarded to a Black-owned company. That same year President Franklin D. Roosevelt named him to a national conference on housing.

He died on the twelfth of December 1952 at his home in Nashville. Schools, a park, and a neighborhood there bear his name. From a craft first learned in bondage, three generations of McKissacks built a legacy in stone and standing — and Moses McKissack III raised it into an enduring house of honor.