Persley taught mechanical drawing at Tuskegee University until 1920 when he became the first Black architect registered in Georgia.

His work includes landmarks such as the Colored Masonic Temple in Birmingham, Alabama, and Campbell Church Chapel in Americus. There is even a street in Macon with his surname. But much of Persley’s story is untold.

Anyone who has spent time at Atlanta landmarks such as Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International Airport, Centennial Olympic Park, Zoo Atlanta, the Atlanta Botanical Garden, Ebenezer Baptist Church, the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. National Historic Park and birth home, Five Points and Midtown MARTA stations, the Buckhead Library, the Fulton County Courthouse, Underground Atlanta and the campuses of Spelman or Morehouse Colleges has observed, utilized and likely enjoyed the work of Atlanta’s Black architects.

But these achievements were hard won. The lack of opportunity and diversity in the field, combined with inadequate preservation efforts, have left Black architects and Black architecture in near-constant peril.

One effort to preserve historic structures designed by Black architects came in 2022 when the Getty Foundation committed $3.1 million to the Conserving Black Modernism initiative. Some of that money went to protect Dansby, Brawley, and Wheeler halls at Morehouse College, all designed by Atlanta architect Leon Allain.

Allain, along with Edward Charles Miller ― considered to be Atlanta’s first registered Black architect ― were among the forefathers of Black architecture. The two met at Tuskegee University where Miller was a professor and Allain was a student, and together they formed Miller & Allain Architects in 1959.

Miller had already designed notable buildings in Atlanta including the International Theological Center, Ebenezer Baptist Church and many homes in the Collier Heights neighborhood before partnering with Allain. Their joint portfolio consisted primarily of Historically Black Colleges and Universities.

Allain went on to found his own firm, Allain & Associates, in 1967 and had a breakout moment when he developed joint ventures with other Black architects to propose work on larger projects such as the Georgia Dome and Hartsfield Airport.

The airport, then as now, was a catalyst for industry in Atlanta, said Garfield Peart, director of operations at Moody Nolan, one of the country’s largest Black-owned architecture firms with offices in 12 cities.. “It is a $10 billion program that still continues,” he said. “It is part of the city of Atlanta, so diversity was heavily encouraged.”

Those once-in-a-lifetime projects in Atlanta — the airport, the 1996 Olympics and later Mercedes-Benz Stadium — could help propel an architect to a successful career.

Allain eventually began working on projects across the state and he earned a pilot’s license to fly between job sites. In 1999, he sold his practice but his legacy lives on through a scholarship fund designed to benefit future Black architects at his alma mater.

Labor of love

Another Black pioneer in the field, South Carolina native J.W. Robinson graduated from Hampton University in 1949 with a degree in architecture, but he was denied a license because of discrimination. Instead, he worked as a schoolteacher for 15 years at Booker T. Washington High School.

Without a license, his design work was limited to residential housing, and he developed a passion for creating homes that would reshape Black communities impacted by segregation. In the 1950s, Collier Heights was a bustling neighborhood where notable Black residents moved, and where many of the homes were designed by Miller and Robinson.

Built in 1956, Robinson’s famous “Alphabet” ranch house ― a style of home designed to replicate the shape of a letter ― is often referenced as an example of unique midcentury housing styles in Collier Heights. Shaped like the letter “O,” the house was designed for the band director at the school where Robinson taught.

By the 1970s, Robinson had earned his license and started his own firm. As the first Black architect in the state to be named a fellow of the American Institute of Architects, an honor given to those who have made outstanding contributions to the field, Robinson’s work reflected his commitment to preserving the cultural and architectural history of Black Atlanta.

Robinson’s legacy was continued by his sons Joseph W. Robinson, Jr. and Jeffrey L. Robinson, who also became an architect. Robinson Sr. and Jeffrey have died, but in 2015 Jeffrey told Creative Loafing, “African Americans have played and will continue to play a vital role in shaping the city’s architectural and cultural history. The last decade has shown that most people don’t understand the significance of our historic buildings.”

That significance had an impact in Collier Heights, a neighborhood rich in Black architecture.

William Stanley found his calling when his family moved to the neighborhood in the 1950s. Stanley enjoyed watching the construction of churches and homes in the community.

He applied to Georgia Tech’s School of Architecture, knowing he would have to prove himself at a school that had yet to graduate a Black student. He became the first one when he earned his degree in 1972.

At Tech, Stanley met his future wife, Ivenue, the first Black woman to earn a degree in architecture from the school. They married in 1978 and launched a firm. Small projects kept them afloat in the early days as they both worked other jobs. It took almost 15 years before larger projects began flowing their way in the early 1990s, including the renovation and expansion of Grady Memorial Hospital and the Olympic Aquatic Center at Georgia Tech.

Among their most well-known designs is the Horizon Sanctuary of Ebenezer Baptist Church, a 1,600-seat sanctuary inspired by an African tribal meeting house. Its Afrocentric design elements include a “thatched-style” copper roof that will patina to green and an obelisk bell tower inspired by the stelae of Axum in Ethiopia.

Credit: Stanley Love-Stanley P.C

Credit: Stanley Love-Stanley P.C

Architecture should be a celebration, Stanley said, and their firm is guided by their desire to work with clients who understood their ethos. “It has been a labor of love and Atlanta was the right city at the right time and Ivenue was the right partner,” he said.

Now in their 70s, the Stanleys are still hard at work but in an atmosphere very different from when they began almost 50 years ago.

Opportunities for Black architects in Atlanta have been shrinking for decades, a casualty of a shifting political and business climate that long-ago lost its champion: Maynard Jackson.

The Maynard effect

The boom years for Black architects in Atlanta began when Maynard Jackson was elected as the city’s first Black mayor from 1974 to 1982 and again in 1990. Jackson was intentional about bringing Black architects to the table on major city projects.

Perhaps inspired by Whitney M. Young Jr.’s 1968 speech at the American Institute of Architecture national convention calling for diversity in the profession, Jackson issued a call to newly minted ranks of Black architects.

His economic integration policies created unprecedented opportunities for Black people in Atlanta by mandating that a percentage of city and airport contracts go to minority businesses. From 1974 to 1979, the percentage of city business that went to minority firms jumped from 0.5% to 38%.

For Oscar Harris, that was enough incentive to leave Parsons Brinckerhoff, where he worked on conceptual designs and project management for MARTA, to strike out on his own.

The Pittsburgh native and graduate of Lincoln University had attended architecture school at Howard University before transferring to Carnegie Mellon. In 1973, based on the strength of his thesis on transit, Parsons Brinckerhoff had invited him to Atlanta.

Credit: AJC FILE

Credit: AJC FILE

With a loan from his brother and the support of his wife Sylvia, in 1977 he opened the Atlanta outpost of Turner Associates, an unair-conditioned, 500-square-foot office on Peachtree Street. He had a new home, a young family and no business.

“I was scared, but I had the credentials and I was committed to my own spirit,” said Harris when we talked at his home in southwest Atlanta. He described that moment as jumping off a cliff and hearing nothing but air. “I wanted to be in charge of what I was doing. I wanted to own what I do. I wanted to be selected for major iconic public structures,” he said.

His first job was designing a water treatment plant, but Harris did it with no hesitation. In those early years, he drove to work at 4 a.m., returned home at 5 p.m. then spent the hours between 7 and 9 p.m. developing new business.

Harris has left an extensive imprint on downtown Atlanta with projects that include Underground Atlanta, the iconic Centennial Olympic Park Light Towers, the Atlanta Public Schools Administration Building and the Sam Nunn Federal Center.

Design for the Fulton County Government Center was inspired by a trip to South Africa, where Harris had observed a government center with walls inside of walls. He would use that design concept on the south side of the Atlanta building.

Unique architectural design is like bending a note in jazz, Harris explained as we sat in his home office surrounded by his abstract expressionist paintings. In 2010 when he closed his firm, Harris turned to painting, a path more creative and less competitive than architecture.

In his 2013 memoir, “Oscar: The Memoir of a Master Architect,” Harris reflected on his career noting that in the years since the 1996 Olympics, with a decline in diversity initiatives, Black architects began to see public sector opportunities dry up.

“Atlanta has not continued to build that foundation of coming together and being totally inclusive,” Harris wrote. “This approach will not be good for Atlanta in the long haul.”

Legacy with limits

These days, Harris spends his time painting, his brushstrokes accompanied by the music of John Coltrane or Miles Davis. Sometimes, he shows his artwork in solo exhibits. Although he remains a licensed architect, his engagement with the field is mostly mentoring young students through Spike Studio, a nonprofit that encourages minority students to pursue careers in architecture.

Today, Black architects compose 2% of architects in the country, said Peart of Moody Nolan. In Georgia, there are 230 licensed Black architects, according to the National Organization of Minority Architects.

Young Black architects are rising in the ranks in Atlanta, but Black architecture firms struggle to survive beyond a single generation because there aren’t enough Black architects in the pipeline.

The expectation that Cheryl McAfee would take over the family business was clear. She was interested in wildlife and the outdoors, but her father was adamant she study environmental design at Kansas State University.

Credit: Jason Getz / Jason.Getz@ajc.com

Credit: Jason Getz / Jason.Getz@ajc.com

Charles McAfee had an established practice in Kansas before opening an Atlanta office in the 1970s. Cheryl McAfee recalls traveling between Kansas and Georgia while her father worked, excited by everything that was happening in Atlanta.

After earning a master’s degree in urban design from Harvard University, she began working for a firm in Boston. Her first project was the biggest project in the city, Copley Plaza.

She was moving up, particularly after taking on a big project in Baghdad, but her dad, fearing she may stray too far from home, made a pitch for her to work with him.

McAfee agreed, and in the 1990s she began working on her biggest project yet: designing, constructing and managing the sports facilities for the 1996 Olympics in Atlanta. “It was a magnificent project but a fight every day,” McAfee said.

She was reminded regularly of the challenges of being a woman in the profession. Black women make up less than 0.5% of architects in the country.

McAfee had recruited a diverse team, but other firms on the project would often question their credentials. When it was time for photographs, they put her team front and center to make sure the project looked diverse. When the project ended, larger firms hired members of her team at salaries two to three times greater than what she could pay, she said.

Working with her sister, McAfee has kept their father’s legacy alive and carried the firm forward with new vision.

Their projects include the conversion of the Ashby Street Theatre, one of Atlanta’s first theaters to serve the African American community, into a multiuse business and community center. They are also restoring the Phyllis Wheatley YWCA, which had been closed for over a decade but will offer health and wellness classes and services for kids when it reopens later this year.

“I want to leave something that lifts somebody else up, whether it is inclusive of the people who work on the project or the people that will use the space,” said McAfee. “When you lift up everybody, everybody benefits and you have a better community.”

ABOUT THIS SERIES

This year’s AJC Black History Month series, marking its 10th year, focuses on the role African Americans played in building Atlanta and the overwhelming influence that has had on American culture. These daily offerings appear throughout February in the paper and on ajc.com and ajc.com/news/atlanta-black-history.

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Credit: John Spink

Credit: John Spink

Black architects in Atlanta

Atlanta’s Black architects have designed many iconic structures, renovations and additions throughout the city and beyond. Here is a sample.

Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport, The Atrium and Concourse E

Oscar Harris, 1993, 1996

Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport, Airport Canopy

Stanley Love-Stanley, 2020

Centennial Olympic Park, Hermes Light Towers

Oscar Harris, 1996

Zoo Atlanta

Oscar Harris, created master plan, 1984

Atlanta Botanical Garden, parking structure

J.W. Robinson & Associates, joint venture, 2008

Ebenezer Baptist Church

Edward Miller, additions and alterations, 1955-1956

JW Robinson & Associates, addition and alterations, 1970

Horizon Sanctuary, Stanley Love Stanley, 1994-1999

MLK birth home

JW Robinson & Associates, renovation, 1974

Buckhead Library

McAfee3, renovation, 2019

Fulton County Government Center

Oscar Harris, joint venture, 1989

Underground Atlanta

Oscar Harris, joint venture, 1989

Grady Memorial Hospital

Stanley Love Stanley, renovation, joint venture, early 1990s