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An American Original Robert Robinson Taylor Joins Black Heritage Stamp Series Robert Robinson Taylor (June 8, 1868-December 13, 1942) was an American architect; by some accounts the first accredited African American architect. He was also the first African American student enrolled at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 1888. Additionally, he designed many of the buildings on the campus of Tuskegee University prior to 1932, and he served as second-in-command to its founder and first President, Booker T. Washington. Taylor’s first building project on the Tuskegee University campus was the Science Hall (Thrasher Hall) completed in 1893. The new Science Hall was constructed entirely by students, using bricks made also by students under Taylor’s supervision. The project epitomized Washington’s philosophy of instilling in Tuskegee students, the descendants of former enslaved Africans, the value and dignity of physical labor and it provided an example to the world of the capabilities of African Americans in the building trades, and it underscored the larger potential of the manual training curricula being developed at Tuskegee. A number of other buildings followed, including the original Tuskegee Chapel, erected between 1895 and 1898. After the Chapel came The Oaks, built in 1899, home of the Tuskegee University president. From 1899 to 1902, he returned to Cleveland, Ohio to work on his own and for the architectural firm of Charles W. Hopkinson. Upon his return to Tuskegee from Cleveland in 1902, he was architect and director of “mechanical industries” until his retirement in the mid-1930s. Taylor also designed Carnegie libraries at Wiley College in Marshall, Texas and at Livingstone College in Salisbury, North Carolina. With his later partner, the black architect Louis H. Persley, he did large buildings at Selma University in Selma, Alabama, and the Colored Masonic Temple, which is also an office building and entertainment venue, in Birmingham, Alabama. He served for a period as vice-principal of Tuskegee, beginning in 1925. In 1929, under the joint sponsorship of the Phelps-Stokes Fund, the Liberian government, and Firestone Rubber, he went to Kakata, Liberia to lay out architectural plans and devise a program in industrial training for the proposed Booker Washington Institute – “the Tuskegee of Africa.” Robert Taylor served on the Mississippi Valley Flood Relief Commission, appointed by President Herbert Hoover, and was chairman of the Tuskegee chapter of the American Red Cross. Following his retirement to his native Wilmington, North Carolina in 1935, the governor of North Carolina appointed Taylor to the board of trustees of what is now Fayetteville State University. He died on December 13, 1942 while attending services in the Tuskegee Chapel, the building that he considered his most outstanding achievement as an architect. He was buried at the Pine Forest Cemetery in Wilmington, North Carolina. The housing project in Chicago, Robert Taylor Homes, was named after his son, Robert Rochon Taylor, a civic leader, communist and former Chairman of the Chicago Housing Authority. His great-granddaughter, Valerie Jarrett, is a Senior Advisor to President Barack Obama. 3