True Life Tuesday: Robert Robinson Taylor

No matter what the orange man and his cronies say I will celebrate Black History Month. 

Robert Robinson Taylor was born on June 8, 1868 in Wilmington, North Carolina. His father, Henry Taylor, was born a slave but was freed in 1847. He worked as a carpenter and businessman. Robert's mother, Emily Still Taylor, was the daughter of a freedman. In 1888 he started attending the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He was the first African American to attend the school. He studied architecture at the school and graduated in 1892. 

While at MIT he met and spoke with Booker T. Washington on many occasions. Washington wanted Taylor to develop and industrial program and plan and direct construction of new buildings at the Tuskegee Institute. Taylor drew upon the MIT model to built his curriculum at Tuskegee. The first architecture project he worked on at the institute was the science hall in 1893. He moved to Cleveland, Ohio in 1899 to work on his own projects. He returned to Tuskegee in 1902. He also designed buildings at Wiley College, Livingston College and Selma University. In 1929 he went to Liberia to design and develop a program in industrial training at the Booker T. Washington Institute. Taylor was appointed by President Herbert Hoover to serve on the Mississippi Valley Flood Relief. He was also the Chairman of the Tuskegee chapter of the American Red Cross. he retired in 1933 and returned to Wilmington. He was then appointed by the governor to the board of trustees of the State Colored Normal School (now Fayetteville State University) in 1935.

In 1890 he married Beatrice Rochon Taylor and they had four children. Beatrice died in 1906. He then remarried Nellie Chestnutt in 1912 and had another child. He died on December 13, 1942 while attending a service at the Tuskegee Chapel. He called the chapel to be his greatest architectural achievement. He was buried in the Pine Forest Cemetery in Wilmington. The Taylor School of Architecture and Construction Science at the Tuskegee Institute is named after him. The Robert Taylor Homes, a housing project in Chicago, was named after him and his son, Robert Rochon Taylor. His son Robert was at one time the Chairman of the Chicago Housing Authority. His great-granddaughter, Valerie Jarret, worked as a senior advisor to President Barak Obama.