Out of the Shadows

That an African-American had designed Duke, a whitesonly 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 self-effacing 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.”

Magazine, Smithsonian. “Out of the Shadows.” Smithsonian Magazine. Accessed May 12, 2022. https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/out-of-the-shadows-85569503/.