Robert R. Taylor

Robert Robinson Taylor was born on June 8, 1868, in Wilmington, North Carolina, into a family that had already turned skill into standing. His father, Henry Taylor — the son of a white slaveholder and an enslaved woman — had been manumitted, freed in 1847, and built a prosperous life as a carpenter, contractor, and builder along the Wilmington waterfront, constructing cargo vessels for the Caribbean and South American trade and raising commercial and residential buildings across the city.

That craftsman's household shaped the son. In 1888 Robert Taylor enrolled at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, becoming the first African American student known to attend the institution. When he graduated with the Class of 1892 in architecture, he became the first academically trained and accredited African American architect in the United States — a distinction earned in the front rank of his profession, not granted at its margins.

Booker T. Washington, who wished to model Tuskegee Institute's training on MIT's, recruited Taylor to Alabama that same year. There Taylor became the campus's principal designer and, in time, head of its mechanical industries. His first project, the Science Hall, was finished in 1893; over roughly four decades he planned and oversaw dozens of buildings, including the chapel he regarded as his finest work, while teaching a generation of Black builders and draftsmen.

Taylor served Tuskegee until his retirement in the 1930s and died on December 13, 1942, having collapsed inside the very chapel he had designed. His campus still stands as his monument, and the Robert R. Taylor School of Architecture and Construction Science carries his name forward. We honor the man who drew the first accredited line and left generations a place to stand.