Here, Kwesi Daniels, head of Tuskegee University's department of architecture, shares how the past year has brought him hope for more frank conversations in the design community.
Right before George Floyd was murdered, I was working on my dissertation, which looked at the impact of Drexel University’s expansion on the Mantua and Powelton Village communities. Then we had the uprisings in Philadelphia where they were tearing down the statue of Frank Rizzo—a major figure in terms of police brutality and a lot of the racial tension that happened there—that was in front of the Municipal Services Building. That was huge. And then I went from that to George Floyd’s murder.
I remember explaining to one of my advisers on my committee that this is hard for me because all of this is personal, both from my research and from being a Black man in this country. And she didn’t get it. And I’m like, “How could you not get this?” It’d be interesting to see what that conversation would look like now.
Some folks who are now looking at racial tension in the country have become more awake to the challenges that other people are facing. It’s kind of hard to accept because George Floyd wasn’t the first. It’s difficult to understand how yesterday, it wasn’t OK to focus on these racial issues, but now it is. So, that’s one vein.
The other piece is that we can now have conversations that we would not have had before because I know you would have been uncomfortable with me speaking the truth that I have experienced. Between that and the Black Lives Matter movement, it’s raised awareness. It’s encouraged people to ask questions and to reach out to us as a university.
It’s been a great moment for our students. I don’t know if it’s BLM or COVID—it was the perfect storm. People are looking for ways to support our students. And now we’re all virtual so you can engage with my students in the classroom or hire my students virtually. If you have an opportunity in San Francisco and my students are in Alabama, they’re not getting to San Francisco physically. But because of COVID and Zoom, they’re there now.
On Conversations in the Classroom
Being at Tuskegee University, my classroom is predominantly students of color—and the majority are African American. Having a conversation about what’s going on in this country and how it’s affecting us as African Americans is not new. The quality of projects that we’ve done historically have always been rooted in identity. Who are you as an architect? What does it mean to design as a Black architect? Is there such a thing as a Black architecture? We’re about the sixth or seventh oldest architecture program in the country, and we historically used architecture to improve African American communities all over the country through education and housing.
What has changed is that mental health has come to the foreground. We are now asking our students questions like: How are you doing? How are you feeling today? Let’s take a pause from our regularly scheduled programming and do a check-in. Being in the South with all of the racist commentary and gaslighting from the Trump presidency, we needed to mentally prepare students for what could arise.
On My Role
I don’t know that my role has changed significantly—maybe it’s just been magnified—because the type of work I’ve done historically has been addressing the challenges that face African American communities and finding how architecture can play a role in improving the conditions. We were all trained similarly, but we don’t all address the social aspect. We design jails, but don’t ask why we need them. We design schools, but we don’t ask why do they fail and is architecture playing a role in that?
We’ve known that fewer than 2% of registered architects are African American. A lot of people are now saying, “Wow, how do we change the statistic? How do we increase these numbers?” That’s brought a lot of attention to historically Black colleges or universities in a way that has not always been there. I remember chasing these top firms to bring them into our program and to see our students. Before BLM became big, we created a space and an environment to attract these firms, and some were already coming.
Then the AIA Large Firms Roundtable asked, “How can we better support African American architects and HBCUs?” So the firms started to reach out and because we had this space, a number of them that showed up and said, “Hey, we would love to take a look at your students.” And then COVID has added another layer that made it easy: We can do a career fair, and you don’t have to leave the comfort of your office.
On the Design Community
What I would love, first of all, is if we became more honest about the way that we operate in the country from a design standpoint—and then design around that. If we do not acknowledge how complicit the architecture and the design community has been toward the maintenance of racial inequality, then we will not have the foundation upon which everybody else can prosper. When you look at the work that African Americans have done in this country, these terms we now throw out come to mind: sustainability and resilience.
There is nothing more resilient than a body of people who are enslaved and then are subjected to the Jim Crow Laws. They literally are not allowed to be and do certain things. Yet they flourish. That is resilience. This is how they flourished with very limited resources. That is sustainability.
Here is an example, which is related to [The New York Times Magazine’s] 1619 Project. I am working with a gentleman who is a direct descendant of the first Africans [in America]. He said to me, “My family was never enslaved. The first Africans who came over here were not slaves. They were indentured servants. We did not get enslaved until we actually did too good a job.”
The [general] understanding of the narrative of people of color in this country is so twisted that I would love for the design world to say, “We are not going to continue to proliferate lies about groups of people. We are going to celebrate everybody—who they are and what they are about.”
I start with African Americans because in this particular country, that has always been the dichotomy. It is white and Black. Everybody else—including the Indigenous populations—falls into that gray area. [People think,] “As long as I am doing better than Black, we are good.” If we can raise the bar for Black, the bar for everyone else automatically raises.
As a discipline, as a profession, if we want this country to be as great as it has the capacity to be, we first have to be bold enough to say, “We’re not going to tell those lies any longer. We are going to reconcile the role that we’ve played in the maintenance of marginalizing people strictly because of their racial classification.”
And then we’re going to do the exact opposite of that. Let’s start the other way around. And then we’re going to prove the value of design to elevate the standard of experience for everyone. We’re going to go after the worst problems, the most difficult problems: homelessness, mass incarceration, criminalization. Only when they disappear can we as designers know we have truly solved the problems. Until then, I don’t know how much credibility we can give ourselves.
Making a Difference
My game-changing project was the restoration of the Shiloh-Rosenwald School in Notasulga, Ala. It was a convergence of all the work that I’d been doing prior. Our department was approached in 2007-2008 to help to restore the schoolhouse. In that process I learned about the role that Tuskegee played in the creation of 5,000 school houses and teacher homes from Virginia all the way through Texas in rural communities, which are affectionately known as Rosenwald schools.
The students and I are literally out in the community restoring windows and looking at how to restore windows. I saw community come together. This space was also impacted by racism: It was one the of the major hosting sites of participants in the U.S. Public Health Service, Syphilis study in Macon County, also known as the Tuskegee Syphilis Study. It was a major hosting site for these men. Here is this racial injustice that has been done, this bio warfare that was done on this community and through architecture we got a chance to deal with all of this. We were using architecture to bring humanity back to a community from which it was stripped. Because these men—who were fathers, uncles, breadwinners, farmers, preachers—they were reduced down to subjects one, two, three, and four. Their eyes were covered and they were shown as lab rats.
You have dehumanized them, and we get to bring humanity back through architecture. You realize that to build community does not mean everybody has to have money. It does mean everyone has to bring their heart to the table and then share some of it with everyone.
In that eight-month process, we taught people in the community, hired people in the community. We brought universities, communities, administrators, students, and faculty together. We changed the narrative about what it meant to be Black in this country or Black in a rural environment, or when people wonder whether Black people care about education. We learned how the communities that constructed the Tuskegee/Rosenwald/Community schools raised half the funding for their school. We helped restore the Shiloh school and they are now able to show people what it was like when we as Black people educated ourselves in our schools.
The school eventually was placed on the National Register of Historic Places. People can schedule tours to learn about what it was like to be educated in a rural area. That is the type of stuff that makes your soul feel good. That is the stuff that makes your heart overflow with positive emotion.
As told to Wanda Lau. The views and conclusions from this author are not necessarily those of ARCHITECT magazine or of The American Institute of Architects.
