WASHINGTON PARK — The U.S. Postal Service will unveil a new stamp in Washington Park of Robert Robinson Taylor on Sunday.
Postal Service officials will celebrate the release of the new stamp of the nation’s first formally trained black architect at 1 p.m. at the DuSable Museum of African American History, 740 E. 56th Place, during the annual DuSable Day celebration.
Taylor’s name may ring a bell for some Chicagoans because of the former Robert Taylor Homes public housing complex that bore his name.
Taylor was the first black architect to graduate from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He went on to design and build the Tuskegee Institute in Alabama, develop the architectural curriculum and oversaw industrial education and building trades programs at the school for three decades.
The Robert Taylor Homes were not officially named for Taylor, but instead his son, Robert Rochon Taylor, who was a former chairman of the Chicago Housing Authority.
The architect’s granddaughter is Valerie Jarrett, who lives in Kenwood and is a senior adviser to President Barack Obama.
“Anytime I face a daunting challenge and self-doubt creeps in, I think of my great grandfather, Robert Taylor, the son of a slave, who traveled from Wilmington, N.C., to attend MIT in 1888,” Jarrett said at the unveiling of the stamp at the Smithsonian’s National Postal Museum in Washington, D.C. “My family is proud to stand on his shoulders, and we know that it is our responsibility to embrace his values, to ensure that his legacy will be ‘forever stamped’ in the conscious of future generations.”
Collectors can get a first-day-of-issue postmark by putting the stamps on envelopes addressed to themselves or others and mailing them in a larger envelope to Robert Robinson Taylor Stamp, Special Events, P.O. Box 92282, Washington, D.C. 20090-2282.
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