Trailblazers in Black History: Hilyard Robinson

 

Dolores Hayden, in her books Redefining the American Dream and The Power of Place: Urban Landscapes as Public History, elaborates how conventional ideas of gender, class, and caste influence the critical evaluation of architectural achievement—a discussion extremely relevant to the careers of Julian Francis Abele, Hilyard Robinson, and Paul R. Williams. This trio of African Americans remains largely invisible within the history of architecture and architects in the United States, even as their work increasingly becomes known in the black community. Rectifying this invisibility would surely be consistent with the current and appropriate emphasis on our society’s “multicultural” character, if, by that term, we mean to encourage a fundamental reconceptualization of who we have been and are as a people.

Here's an excerpt from the book on the contributions of Hilyard Robinson. 

"In 1996, a made-for-TV movie chronicled the true-life exploits of the “The Tuskeegee Airmen,” African American fighter pilots who received segregated training in Alabama at an army base adjacent to Tuskeegee Institute, and who served with great distinction in the Second World War. As a child living at Tuskeegee and watching those young men swagger around the campus, I knew exactly what I wanted to be when I grew up—no matter that many in the military scoffed at the notion of black pilots.

"Not only did one of the airmen, Dr. Roscoe Brown, become the first pilot of any color to shoot down a Luftwaffe jet, but, unknown to me at the time, the base where he and the others trained was designed by a black architect, Hilyard Robinson,⁶ and built by a black architectural and construction firm, McKissack & McKissack. (Most of Tuskeegee’s major buildings were also designed by black architects and built by students, in keeping with the philosophy of its founder, Booker T. Washington.)" 

Click here for the full article. 

Source: Harvard Design Magazine