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COPYRIGHT 2005 Smithsonian Institution
In the spring of 1986, Duke University students protesting the school's investments in apartheid South Africa erected shanties in front of the university chapel, a soaring spire of volcanic stone modeled after England's Canterbury Cathedral. The nature of the protest prompted one undergraduate to complain to the student newspaper. The shacks, she wrote, violate "our rights as students to a beautiful campus."
For Duke sophomore Susan Cook, the letter was a call to action. She had told only a couple of her classmates that she was related to the man who had designed the Duke chapel--indeed, who had designed most of the original buildings on the school's neo-Gothic west campus and many on its Georgian east campus. She had never met him, but she felt certain that if he were still alive, he would support the divestment rally as wholeheartedly as she did. So she penned an emotional rebuttal. Duke's beauty, she wrote, was an example of "what a black man can create given the opportunity." Her great-granduncle, Philadelphia architect Julian Abele (pronounced "able"), was "a victim of apart-heid in this country" who had conceived the Duke campus but had never seen it because of the Jim Crow laws then in force in the segregated South.
That an African-American had designed Duke, a whites-only institution until 1961, was news to nearly everyone. Abele's role was not a secret, as documents in the university archives make clear. But it had never been acknowledged so publicly. Cook's letter changed that. Now, an oil portrait of the architect--the first of a black person at Duke--hangs in the main lobby of the administration building. Even the university Web site devotes a page to him.
The recognition was long overdue. Abele was not the first black architect in the United States, but he was probably the most accomplished of his era. Between 1906, when he joined the all-white Philadelphia firm of Horace Trumbauer, until his death in 1950, he designed or contributed to the design of some 250 buildings, including Harvard's Widener Memorial Library, the Museum of Art and the Free Library, both in Philadelphia, and a host of Gilded Age mansions in Newport and New York City. Abele's race, coupled with his selfeffacing personality, meant he would not be widely known during his lifetime outside Philadelphia's architectural community. The custom of signing sketches with the firm's name rather than an individual designer's also made credit impolitic to claim. "The lines are all Mr. Trumbauer's," Abele once said of the Free Library, "but the shadows are all mine."
Born in 1881, Julian Francis Abele was the youngest of eight in a family of achievers that had long been a fixture of Philadelphia's African-American aristocracy. On his mother's side he could claim Absalom Jones, co-founder of the Free African Society, an early (1787) mutual support group for the city's free blacks. His older brother Robert became a physician. Two other siblings were successful sign makers. "Julian's is not a rags to riches story," says Susan Cook, now a...
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