THE BLACK AMERICAN HISTORY

Tennessee tried to deny them architectural licenses because they were Black. They sued the state, won, and then built the air base for the Tuskegee Airmen.

Somewhere in the 1880s, in Nashville, Tennessee, a Black man named Gabriel Moses McKissack carved gingerbread trim for the Maxwell House Hotel. The decorative woodwork was intricate, precise, the kind of flourish that made guests look up at a building and think it was elegant without ever wondering whose hands had made it so.

The Maxwell House Hotel was built beginning in 1859, using enslaved labor. In 1866, former Confederate General Nathan Bedford Forrest was inducted into the Ku Klux Klan in Room 10 of that same building, and a year later, the Klan held its first national meeting in the hotel's halls.

Seven American presidents slept inside its walls. Theodore Roosevelt drank its coffee and reportedly called it "good to the last drop."

And the gingerbread trim, the delicate carved ornament that dressed the building in beauty, was made by a Black man whose father had been enslaved.

Gabriel's father was Moses McKissack I, born around 1790, a member of the Ashanti people of West Africa. He was kidnapped, brought to America, and sold into bondage to a white contractor named William McKissack of North Carolina.

Under enslavement, Moses I was trained to make bricks. The skill was never given as a gift; it was extracted as labor, put to work building structures that would never carry his name.

But Moses I did something the system did not anticipate. He taught his children the trade, not because anyone permitted it, but because he understood that craft, once lodged in the hands, could not be confiscated.

He married a woman named Mirian in 1822, and together they had fourteen children. Their ninth child, Gabriel Moses McKissack, born in 1840, learned every technique his father knew and then exceeded them.

Gabriel became a master carpenter, known for spiral staircases and ornamental woodwork. He settled in Giles County, Tennessee, fathered six sons, and the buildings he touched across the county still stood long after the people who refused to credit him were forgotten.

The gingerbread trim on the Maxwell House Hotel was just one job. But it tells you everything about the arrangement this country preferred: Black hands making white spaces beautiful, with no name attached and no recognition offered.

Gabriel passed the trade to his son Moses McKissack III, who was born in Pulaski, Tennessee, in 1879. Moses III attended the segregated Pulaski Colored High School, and at around age eleven, a local white architect hired him to help with designs, drawings, and construction.

By 1895, while still a teenager, Moses III was overseeing building crews across Tennessee and Alabama. By 1905, he had moved to Nashville and opened his own construction business.

His first commission that year tells you something the original story never mentioned. Moses McKissack III was hired to build a new house for the dean of architecture and engineering at Vanderbilt University, one of the most prestigious white institutions in the South.

A Black man, educated in a segregated school, self-taught through apprenticeship and his father's instruction, building the personal home of the man who trained white architects for a living. Nashville did not find this ironic at the time because Nashville was not paying attention to whose hands did the actual building.

In 1908, the firm's first major commission arrived: the Carnegie Library at Fisk University. It was a two-story Classical Revival building, brick with stone columns and an interior light well.

The cornerstone was laid by William Howard Taft, then serving as Secretary of War, the same office that would later authorize the contract for the Tuskegee airfield. The building still stands on the Fisk campus and is listed on the National Register of Historic Places.

Moses III's younger brother, Calvin Lunsford McKissack, was born in 1890 and attended Fisk University in Nashville. Calvin started his own independent practice in Dallas, Texas, in 1912, designing dormitories and Black schools, before returning to Tennessee in 1915 to teach architectural drawing at Tennessee Agricultural and Industrial State Normal School.

Both brothers eventually obtained architectural degrees through a correspondence course. According to multiple sources, that course was offered through MIT, because no university in Tennessee would have allowed them through the door.

Think about that for a moment. Two Black men in the Jim Crow South earned architecture degrees by mail from one of the most rigorous institutions in the country because the state they lived in would not let them sit in a classroom.

In 1921, Tennessee enacted a professional registration law requiring architects to be licensed. The McKissack brothers applied to take the certification exam.

They were denied. Not because they lacked qualifications, but because the state did not intend for Black men to hold the title of architect.

The brothers pressed the case. They took the exam anyway, after the state eventually allowed them to sit for it, presumably expecting them to fail.

Both brothers passed. And then the state refused to issue the licenses.

It took national media coverage, outlets picking up the story of two Black architects who had passed Tennessee's own exam and were still being denied their credentials, before the state relented.

The McKissack brothers became the first registered architects in Tennessee and, according to multiple sources, the first licensed Black architects in the southeastern United States.

In 1922, Calvin officially joined his brother as a business partner, and McKissack and McKissack became a formal architectural firm. They moved their offices into the Morris Memorial Building in Nashville, a structure they had designed themselves for the Christian Methodist Episcopal Church's Sunday School Publishing Board, completed in 1925.

Over the next two decades, the firm built homes, churches, schools, and dormitories across Tennessee and the Southeast. They were licensed in twenty-two additional states.

By 1975, the firm had completed more than three thousand building projects, roughly two thousand of which were churches.

But the contract that changed everything arrived in 1942.

The United States was at war, and the military needed an airfield to train Black pilots, the men who would become the legendary Tuskegee Airmen of the 99th Pursuit Squadron. The federal government awarded the design and construction contract to McKissack and McKissack.

The contract was valued at $5.7 million, the equivalent of roughly $107 million today. It was the largest federal contract ever awarded to a Black-owned company at that time.

Approximately 1,600 workers built the base, and at least one account noted there were no racial conflicts among the construction crew. The airfield where Black pilots trained to fly combat missions over Sicily, Anzio, and Berlin was built by a Black firm whose founder's grandfather had been enslaved.

Moses McKissack III died on December 12, 1952. A Nashville middle school was later named in his honor.

Calvin stayed on as president of the firm until his own death in 1968. The youngest son of Moses III, William DeBerry McKissack, took over.

William had expected to pass the business to a son, but he had three daughters instead: Andrea, Cheryl, and Deryl. So he did what the McKissack men had always done: he taught whoever was willing to learn.

By age twelve, Deryl McKissack could do architectural lettering, draft building drawings, and produce window-and-door schedules for clients. All three daughters attended Howard University.

In 1983, the same week Cheryl and Deryl were graduating from Howard with engineering degrees, William suffered a debilitating stroke.

The timing was devastating: a father in the hospital, two daughters in their caps and gowns, and a firm with millions of dollars in active projects that suddenly had no one at the helm.

The morning after William was hospitalized, three major architecture firms called to buy the company. Leatrice Buchanan McKissack, William's wife, a woman who had been a homemaker and had no background in architecture or construction, decided she was not selling.

She walked into an industry that did not respect Black people or women and began running the firm herself. One of her vice presidents threw a stack of papers at her during an argument, and she fired him on the spot.

She found hundreds of thousands of dollars in completed work that had never been invoiced, stuffed in a filing cabinet. Leatrice cleaned house and held the line.

Under her leadership, McKissack and McKissack won contracts at Fisk University, Tennessee State University, Meharry Medical College, a $50 million renovation at Howard University, and the design of the National Civil Rights Museum in Memphis.

In 1990, President George H.W. Bush named her National Female Entrepreneur of the Year, and in 1994, President Clinton awarded her the Presidential Design Award.

When Leatrice retired in 2000, her daughter Cheryl McKissack Daniel purchased the company and became its sole owner, making it the oldest minority-owned and woman-owned design and construction firm in the nation. She opened a New York office and began reshaping skylines.

Deryl McKissack started her own firm, also called McKissack and McKissack, in Washington, D.C., in 1990, with a thousand dollars. Today, her firm manages over $15 billion in projects across seven offices nationwide.

Between them, the sisters' portfolios read like a list of the buildings that define American public life. Cheryl's firm has worked on the US Airways International Terminal at Philadelphia International Airport, the Lincoln Financial Stadium for the Philadelphia Eagles, the World Trade Center, and Columbia University in New York.

Deryl's firm served as project manager for the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture, the Martin Luther King Jr. National Memorial, and improvements to the Lincoln and Jefferson Memorials.

She also oversaw the modernization of 123 Washington, D.C. public schools, including the relocation and renovation of Dunbar High School, the city's first public high school for Black students, which reopened in 2013 and was named the greenest school in the world.

There is a line that runs from a brick made by an enslaved man in the late 1700s to a museum on the National Mall that houses the story of his people.

It passes through gingerbread trim on a Nashville hotel where the Klan was born, through a Carnegie Library whose cornerstone was laid by a future president, through a licensing exam that was never meant to be passed, through a $5.7 million airfield that trained the pilots who helped win a war, through a wife who refused to sell, and through two daughters who split a legacy in half so it could cover the whole country.

The Maxwell House Hotel burned to the ground on Christmas night, 1961. The gingerbread trim Gabriel McKissack carved is gone.

But the family that made it is still building, five generations now and counting. The trim was never meant to last, and neither were they, but the buildings are the answer.

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