![]() ![]() “The land deed said a Black person could not even spend the night,” writes his granddaughter, Karen Hudson, in one of her novels chronicling Williams’ life and works. The house was to be built in the Flintridge Hills area of Los Angeles-an area with regulations that people of color could not live there. ![]() Williams then scored his first contract, a $90,000 deal, but also encountered yet another reminder. Just before he became a licensed architect, an old friend from Polytechnic High looked him up for a design. The experience made him further his education at USC, where he graduated with an architectural engineering degree. The prize was $200 and marked the first time Williams was paid for a design. Cook, Jr., and shortly thereafter won a student competition with his design for a new civic center in Pasadena. He scored an unpaid daytime apprenticeship at the firm of landscape architect Wilbur D. He was also combing the city’s local firms for apprenticeship opportunities. While he was not yet a full-fledged architect, Williams dressed the part, making daily rituals out of pressing his suits and perfectly combing and grooming his mustache. In one ear, he was getting European principles of design, in the other, he was getting more “reminders”: “Your own people can’t afford you, and White clients won’t hire you,” Williams wrote of the criticisms he often heard. With even greater purpose, Williams forged ahead after graduating high school in 1912, studying with the local atelier of the New York-based Beaux-Arts Institute of Design. “If I allow the fact that I am a Negro to checkmate my will to do, now, I will inevitably form the habit of being defeated,” he thought to himself before committing this sentiment to paper some years later. Williams simply used the interaction as fuel. “Whoever heard of a Negro being an architect?” “He stared at me with as much astonishment as he would have had I proposed a rocket flight to Mars,” Williams wrote of an interaction with his Polytechnic High School Guidance Counselor. While Williams now had a focus, he also had his first obstacle. Clarkson’s friends who was in construction turned the young artist onto architecture. ![]() As Williams’ honed his skills, one of Mrs. Clarkson, a thoughtful foster parent who nurtured his love for art and drawing. By the age of 4, both of his parents had passed away from tuberculosis, so he was sent to a foster home. Williams was born in 1894 in a city his life’s work would ultimately help to define: Los Angeles. Julius Shulman Photographic Archive, Research Library, The Getty Research Institute The Beginnings Besides, by trade, the man drew and sketched his own walls. As a black man in early 20th-century America, he encountered constant reminders of racism and prejudice that threatened to bar his success, but Williams didn’t see these threats as insurmountable walls. Paul Revere Williams was one of the most important and prolific commercial architects ever to hit the drawing board. These were the guiding principles in the life of one of the greatest Americans you’ve never heard of. ![]()
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