A foundation for building
‘150 years of MIT’ is a series that looks at specific people and moments from MIT’s 150-year history and explains their lasting effect on the Institute, the nation and the world. See the full interactive timeline at the MIT150 site.In September 1888, a young man hoping to become a builder traveled from North Carolina to Massachusetts, to take MIT’s entrance exam. Robert Taylor did more than pass the test. Taylor, who in 1892 was the first African-American to graduate from MIT, became an American trailblazer as the nation’s first prominent African-American architect, an influential figure who designed elegant buildings and trained generations of students to draw up and engineer structures themselves. Indeed, as the main architect and director of “industrial training” from the 1890s into the 1930s at the Tuskegee Institute in Alabama, which Booker T. Washington turned into a leading university for African-American students, Taylor designed many of the...