Susan Tifft in Smithsonian Magazine:
After decades of obscurity, African-American architect Julian Abele is finally getting recognition for his contributions to some of 20th-century America’s most prestigious buildings.
In 1986, Duke University students protesting the school’s investments in apartheid South Africa erected shanties in front of the university chapel, a soaring spire of volcanic stone modeled after England’s Canterbury Cathedral. The protest prompted one student to complain to the school newspaper. The shacks, she wrote, violate “our rights as students to a beautiful campus.”
Duke sophomore Susan Cook penned an emotional rebuttal. Her great-granduncle, Philadelphia architect Julian Abele, was “a victim of apartheid in this country,” she wrote, who had conceived the Duke campus but had never seen it because of the Jim Crow laws then in force in the segregated South. She felt certain that if he were still alive, he would support the divestment rally wholeheartedly.
That an African-American had designed Duke, a whites-only institution until 1961, was news to nearly everyone, reports Susan Tifft. Although Abele’s role is made clear by documents in the university’s archives, it had never been acknowledged so publicly. The recognition was long overdue.
More here.