As part of our ongoing Black History Month series, where we celebrate Black pioneers in the AEC industry, we’d like to honor Charles Thaddeus Russell, one of Virginia’s first African American architects. He was a large part of the Black Wall Street’s construction in Richmond, Virginia and constructed multiple other historic buildings in the state.
Charles T. Russell was born in Richmond, Virginia in 1875. He was raised in the Jackson Ward neighborhood, a majority Black community. After studying at the Hampton Institute, he graduated in 1899 with a certificate in carpentry and moved to Alabama to supervise the Tuskegee Institute’s carpentry division in 1901. Russell oversaw carpentry work on campus during Institute principal Booker T. Washington’s expansion initiative, and began studying architecture at the institute as well. In 1907, Russell went back to Virginia and served as the superintendent of Virginia Union University, before being allowed to resign and begin his career as an architect.
Russell returned to Richmond shortly afterward, constructing several buildings such as the Richmond Beneficial Insurance Co. building in 1911 and the home of William Henry Hughes in 1915. The Hughes house later became the Negro Training Center for the Blind, the only school for blind African-American children in the state. Russell mostly hired black contractors, often from the neighborhood, as Jackson Ward slowly became a center of Black commerce and finance.
Also in 1915, Russell performed his first professional commission under the direction of Maggie Lena Walker, the first African American woman to both charter a bank and serve as a bank president. He remodeled the St. Luke Building and increased its size to accommodate the new St. Luke Penny Savings Bank, which she chartered. The St. Luke Building was placed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1982. Charles T. Russell later became one of Virginia’s first two licensed African American architects in 1922, and went on to remodel the historic African-American Sixth Mount Zion Church in 1925.
Russell returned to Virginia Union University later in life, and one of his final projects was the move and reconstruction of the Belgian Building to the university in 1942, as its return to Belgium was stopped by the German invasion years earlier and the government-in-exile elected to grant them the building instead. Russell retired shortly after, and died in 1952 at the age of 77.