The 38th stamp in the Black Heritage series honors architect and educator Robert Robinson Taylor (1868–1942). For more than three decades, Taylor supervised the design and construction of the Tuskegee Institute in Alabama, while also overseeing the school’s programs in industrial education and the building trades.

Remembered for his calm determination and quiet dignity, Robert Robinson Taylor (1868–1942) is believed to have been both the first black graduate of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and the country’s first academically trained black architect—accomplishments that helped open a new profession to African Americans.

In 1892, after graduating from MIT, this young man from Wilmington, NC, accepted an offer from educator and activist Booker T. Washington to teach at the Tuskegee Institute, where he soon set about shaping the appearance of the burgeoning school. Over the course of nearly 40 years, Taylor designed dozens of essential buildings, including libraries, dormitories, lecture halls, industrial workshops, and a handsome chapel, transforming a makeshift campus on an abandoned plantation into a confident, state-of-the-art institution.

Taylor’s work as a teacher and administrator was equally vital to the Tuskegee mission. While overseeing programs to train skilled artisans, he also established a curriculum with a certificate to help graduates enter collegiate architecture programs or earn entry-level positions at firms. His work furthered Booker T. Washington’s dream of fostering not just African-American builders and carpenters, but architects who could plan the buildings as well.

Taylor was admired for his decades of leadership at Tuskegee, and in 1911 he gave a speech that summarized the profound benefits of his education. In doing so, he encapsulated not only his personal strengths, but also his lasting legacy: “the love of doing things correctly, of putting logical ways of thinking into the humblest task … and in this way increasing the power and grandeur of the nation.”