African American inventor, Paul E. Williams?
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Paul Revere Williams (February 18, 1894 – January 23, 1980) was an African American architect who based his practice largely in Los Angeles, California and the Southern California area. Orphaned at the age of four, he was the only African American student in his elementary school. He studied at the Los Angeles School of Art and Design and at the Los Angeles branch of the New York Beaux-Arts Institute of Design Atelier, subsequently working as a landscape architect. He went on to attend the University of Southern California designing several residential buildings while still a student there. Williams became a certified architect in 1921, and the first certified African American architect west of the Mississippi. On June 27, 1917 he married Della Mae Givens at the First AME Church in Los Angeles. The couple had three children, who were as follows:
Paul Revere Williams, Jr., born and died, June 30, 1925. Buried at Evergreen Cemetery in Los Angeles, California.
Marilyn Frances Williams, born December 25, 1926.
Norma Lucille Williams, born September 18, 1928.
He won an architectural competition at age 25 and three years later opened his own office. Known as an outstanding draughtsman, Williams perfected the skill of rendering drawings "upside down". This skill was developed so that his clients (who may have been uncomfortable sitting next to a "Black" architect) would see the drawings rendered right side up across the table from him. Fighting to gain attention, he served on the first Los Angeles City Planning Commission in 1920. Williams was the first African American member of the American Institute of Architects (AIA). In 1939 he won the AIA Award of Merit for his design of the MCA Building in Los Angeles (now headquarters of Litton Industries). During World War II Williams worked for the Navy Department as an architect. Following the war he published his first book, The Small Home of Tomorrow (1945), with a successor volume New Homes for Today the following year. In 1957 became the first African American to be voted an AIA Fellow.
In 1951 he won the Omega Psi Phi Man of the Year award and in 1953 Williams received the Spingarn Medal from the NAACP for his outstanding contributions as an architect and member of the African American community. Williams also received honorary doctorates from Howard University (doctor of architecture), Lincoln University (doctor of science), and the Tuskegee Institute (doctor of fine arts). In 2004, USC honored him by listing him among its distinguished alumni, in the television commercial for the school shown during its football games.
Williams famously remarked upon the bitter irony of the fact that most of the homes he designed, and whose construction he oversaw, were on parcels whose deeds included segregation covenants barring blacks from purchasing them.
In an era when architects can be as famous as rock stars, Paul Revere Williams may be the most acclaimed architect you've never heard of.
He designed some of Los Angeles' most famous landmarks — such as the Polo Lounge and the pink-and-green Beverly Hills Hotel. He was the "architect to the stars," building houses for some of Hollywood's biggest names, such as Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz, Cary Grant, Groucho Marx and Frank Sinatra. When Danny Thomas decided to build St. Jude Children's Research Hospital in Memphis in the early 1960s, he turned to Williams, who produced the initial design — for free.
But there was a catch: Williams was a black man in a Jim Crow era. He had to travel on segregated trains. He learned to draw upside down because he couldn't sit next to white clients during a consultation. When he went to the Beverly Hills Hotel, the waiters wouldn't serve him at poolside.
"He had many challenges," says his granddaughter Karen Hudson, who has written several books about Williams and maintains his archives. "He always said he was probably a better craftsman than he would have been because of the challenges — because he had to be better than everybody else."
Now, Williams, who died in 1980 after a career of more than 60 years and 3,000 buildings, is getting long-overdue attention. Some of his buildings have gained historic status. His portrait is in the National Portrait Gallery in Washington, D.C. And the Black Alumni Association of the University of Southern California, where Williams went to school, has mounted an exhibit celebrating him for shaping early Los Angeles. Williams the Conqueror: The Legacy of Architect Paul Revere Williams is on view there through March 31.
A Paul Williams house had "an understated elegance and grace," says Hudson. They feel "warm and cozy, even if they're big."
Born in Los Angeles and orphaned at age 4, Williams grew up with the sprawling but largely undeveloped city, worked his way through art schools and opened his own architecture practice at 28. His projects ranged from public housing to modest middle-class bungalows to multimillion-dollar estates in Beverly Hills, plus the famous Chasen's restaurant, Saks Fifth Avenue in Beverly Hills and the spaceship-like Theme Building at Los Angeles International Airport.
He was politically conservative, not a man to make waves, but he was aware of the prejudice he faced. In a 1937 magazine article, he talked about a client's house in a beautiful neighborhood. "I have dreamed of living there. I could afford such a home. But this evening, leaving my office, I returned to my small, inexpensive home in an unrestricted, comparatively undesirable section of Los Angeles ... because ... I am a Negro."
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