The Legend of Paul R. Williams

Talent battles racism

“Your own people can’t afford you, and white clients won’t hire you.” That’s what Paul R. Williams, a Black man, was told by a teacher of his desire to become an architect. He would go on to design thousands of homes, often for celebrities such as Frank Sinatra, Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz, and Cary Grant.

--On This Day in History: October 29, 2015--

Born in 1894 in Los Angeles, Williams was orphaned at age four when his mother died from tuberculosis, his father having passed from the same illness two years previous. After a time in foster care, he was adopted by a family friend. He was the only Black child at his elementary school.

Williams refused to let racists keep him from his dream, graduating with a degree in architectural engineering in 1919 and becoming a certified architect in 1921—the first Black person west of the Mississippi to achieve such a designation. He excelled at his craft to such an extent that his services were in high demand, but he still had to deal with racism from people who hired him. As an example, he learned to draw upside down because when meeting with white clients he often needed to sit across from them because no way they wanted a Black person sitting beside them. Oof.

To this day, the architecture profession remains overwhelmingly white, but Williams would design over 3,000 homes across the globe during his career. And yet, racist laws forbade him from living in many of the neighborhoods in which he designed homes.

While many were quick to hire him, he didn’t attain much in the way of celebrity status during his working life, partially because he didn’t have a particular style. Rather, he created his designs around what the client wanted. Williams died in 1980 at the age of 85 and became more celebrated after his death thanks to the efforts of his granddaughter, Karen Hudson, who published three books between 1993 and 2012 about her grandfather’s work.

On October 29, 2015, a monument and memorial plaza were dedicated to the work of Paul Williams next to the Golden State Mutual Life Insurance Building in South Los Angeles, which was designed by Williams. Alas, in that same year the American Institute of Architects conducted a survey and discovered that a mere 2% of its membership is Black.

Homes designed by Paul Williams are so desired that they rarely come on the market; those who live in them are reluctant to move. And when they do, real estate agents fight for the listing. They’re never on the market for long.

In 1937 Williams had an article published in American Magazine explaining, “Virtually everything pertaining to my professional life during those early years was influenced by my need to offset race prejudice, by my effort to force white people to consider me as an individual rather than a member of a race.”

Those who cannot remember the past need a history teacher who says “fuck” a lot. Get both volumes of On This Day in History Sh!t Went Down.