A Call to Action

In June of 1968, Civil Rights leader and Executive Director of the National Urban League, Whitney M. Young Jr. gave the keynote speech at the American Institute of Architects National Convention. Young excoriated the association regarding the housing conditions of the urban poor, and the profession’s “thunderous silence” in the face of systemic prejudice. We highly recommend reading the full speech, which can be found at http://content.aia.org/sites/default/files/2018-04/WhitneyYoungJr_1968AIAContention_FulLSpeech.pdf. Sadly, it is incredibly and eerily apropos for the current civil unrest:

“We are a racist nation, and no way in the world could it be otherwise given the history of our country. Being a racist doesn’t mean one wants to go out and join a lynch mob or send somebody off to Africa or engage in crude, vulgar expressions of prejudice. Racism is a basic assumption of superiority on the part of one group over another.”

“Nobody indicts all white men because a white man killed President Kennedy, or Martin Luther King, or a white man stands in a tower in Texas and kills 14 people, or a white man assaults and kills eight nurses in Chicago. They didn’t call him “white.” We called him “sick.” And that’s what they were. With the Negroes, it’s ‘the black man.’”

In response to Young’s speech, the AIA pushed for change through revisions to the AIA Code of Ethics and Professional Conduct, discrimination bans based on race, sex, creed or national origin, and the establishment of the Architects Foundation Diversity Advancement Scholarship and Whitney M. Young Junior Award.

While these are admirable efforts in the right step, there is still vast room for improvement. Though Blacks made up 13 percent of the total U.S. population at the last census, only 2 percent of licensed architects in the U.S. are African-American, according to the National Association of Minority Architects. And only .3% are black women, as of 2019. It wasn’t until 2007 that AIA appointed its first black president; 39 years after Young’s Speech.

While Zaga, as a proud woman-owned firm, has always structured our hiring practices and talent development around the belief that we need more women and minoritized in architecture, we have fallen short of taking the initiative to support and develop black talent in our field. We take the events of the last several weeks incredibly seriously and whole-heartedly believe that black lives MORE than matter. Therefore, we are actively researching and taking steps toward donating our time and resources toward advancing the education and employment opportunities for the next generation of black architects. We will share our action plan soon.