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Women’s History Profile: Elizabeth Carter Brooks
March is Women’s History Month and unfortunately, I still find myself having to perform a Google search to find the list of “Black women architects” in the order of diligent practice to ensure that none of their names are forgotten; to do the work in training an algorithm somewhere out there for these names to be search engine optimised – to make sure that the world wide web can feed me a list of only 10 names of historically recognized Black women in architecture:
1. Norma Merrick Sklarek
2. Beverly Lorraine Greene
3. Kimberly Dowdell
4. Pascale Sablan
5. Tiara Hughes
6. Elizabeth Carter Brooks
7. Roberta Washington
8. Alberta Jeanette Cassell
9. Mariam Issoufou Kamara
10. Amaza Lee Meredith
Of these names, I was most intrigued to know more about Elizabeth Carter Brooks, so this newsletter is in honor of her story, her life, and her work.
Elizabeth Carter Brooks was born in 1867 to Martha Webb in New Bedford, Massachusetts. Webb, formerly enslaved by the tenth U.S. president, John Tyler, helped others to find the path to freedom on the Underground Railroad. Following in the footsteps of her mother, Elizabeth Carter Brooks developed a zeal for activism and racial equality from a young age. Her career began with an education at New Bedford High School and continued into her architecture and design education at the Swain Free School. Swain, a tuition-free institution, had a unique approach towards art and design—offering general studies in these topics, while also providing training courses in teaching, architecture, jewellery, metalwork, painting, ceramics, and other creative trades. Brooks took up teaching as a result of the broadened course offerings at Swain and later went on to study at the Normal School for Teachers. She was the first Black graduate of this institution.
Elizabeth Carter Brooks was a trailblazer! She held many honorable positions in architecture and education. She was the first Black woman to be hired as a public school teacher in New Bedford, the first recording secretary of the National Federation of Afro-American Women, one of the founding participants of the Northeastern Federation of Colored Women’s Clubs, the president of the National Association of Colored Women’s Club (1908-1912), a member of the NAACP, and later the head of the NAACP’s local and regional New Bedford branches. Brooks also petitioned the National American Woman's Suffrage Association for membership at a time when the association did not recognize Colored Women's Clubs as social groups of distinction. Brooks’s political advocacy was all in service of the inclusion of Black women’s voices in local and national dialogue on matters of race.
As an architect and real estate developer, Elizabeth Carter Brooks designed and founded the first organized home for the elderly in New Bedford—the New Bedford Home for the Aged (1908)—and invested in the Martha Briggs Educational Club by aiding the organization in their purchase of Civil War Veteran, Sergeant William H. Carney’s, home. Brooks was also commissioned to plan and supervise the construction of the Phillis Wheatley YWCA for colored women in Washington, D.C. Her work, most closely aligned with development, offers an example of how developmental strategies can be used to better communities and preserve cultural history rather than to extract from and destroy it.
Throughout her career, the heart of Elizabeth Carter Brooks’s work was her passion to educate and emancipate the minds of those in her community. Her activism through the provision of financial support to many of the organizations that she partnered with allowed her architectural practice to operate in a preservationist fashion. Many of the buildings, meeting houses, and schools Brooks built over the course of her career are still standing in New Bedford today.
In 1929, Brooks married Bishop W. Sampson Brooks of the African Methodist Episcopal Church and moved to San Antonio, Texas. She remained there until his death and then returned to New Bedford to continue her mission of preserving Black architectural heritage. She held firm convictions about African American contributions to the built American landscape and believed that these Black-constructed and owned buildings and properties were “monuments to race history"—which distinguished her as one of the first people to recognize the importance of historic preservation in the U.S.. After her passing in 1951, she was honored with a school in her name.
Today, Elizabeth Carter Brooks is honored as a BAD.d woman!
Written by Keren Dillard
Edited by Tamara Evdokimova