Spreading Black excellence: Cheryl McKissack Daniel, Peter Robinson discuss her important new book

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Even having she has undertaken many prestigious and highly profitable commissions, the title of Cheryl McKissack Daniel’s new book — “The Black Family Who Built America, The McKissacks, Two Centuries of Daring Pioneers” — is liable to strike some, particularly white academics, as hyperbolic and even presumptuous.

Taking the helm of her family’s architectural and contracting firm, just as her mother had taken over when her father died, Daniel has seen the business rise to new heights. Ironically, in the process, she’s also overseen its evolution. From an architectural office, it is once again turning back into the business of builders, as it began.

Nonetheless, some are bound to ask, who has ever heard of them? Where do they stand beside historic Black designers like Julian Francis Abele, Vertner Tandy, or Paul Revere Williams? As well known as these outstanding African American architects might be, it’s still the reality that fewer than 5 percent of architects in the U.S. are Black. The number of buildings they design each year, even in New York, is lower still. So where does she get off, calling a chronicle of her family “The Black Family Who Built America, The McKissacks, Two Centuries of Daring Pioneers”?

I already knew that the McKissacks’ firm was the most lucrative Black practice in the country, but this positive assertion was what I was most eager to hear about in attending last week’s discussion between Daniel and Peter Dwayne Robinson, Cornell professor of architecture and chair of the American Institute of Architecture (AIA) NY Center for Architecture (CFA) in the CFA’s auditorium near Washington Square.

Beyond being responsible for Columbia University’s Manhattanville campus, Brooklyn’s Barclays Center (home to the Brooklyn Nets and New York Islanders), Harlem Hospital’s updating, and enormous management jobs for New York’s MTA and the Philadelphia Public School District, there is another way, I learned, that Daniel’s book title couldn’t be a more accurate description of her extraordinary family’s accomplishment and legacy. In microcosm, her family saga is the tale of how a Black worker, like her West African ancestor Moses McKissack, would be taught a trade such as making bricks by William McKissack, his enslaver. Manumitted, Moses was able to sell his bricks. Then, Moses’s son, Moses II, learned to become a master carpenter. Highly skilled, he even learned to build spiral staircases. These men and others built the White House, rebuilt it after the British burned it down during the War of 1812, and constructed the U.S. capital as well.

When Robinson asked Daniel if she didn’t agree that her book should become a part of public school curricula, she spoke with evident pride of these forbears and the excellent example they embody. Boasting of their tenacity in overcoming handicaps, she told Robinson, “They could not seal documents. They were uneducated and could not attend college or university. They did not inherit wealth and had no land, but they did take what they had and did the best that they could with it. Whatever they did, whatever we do, it has to be excellent … That’s something my book has to teach.”

This reminds us that at the time of the Civil War, the value of the enslaved was greater than the combined value of every factory, bank, brokerage, and railroad and steamship line in the nation. What Daniel has to say is that literally and in terms of creating the wealth of America, too, with the McKissacks, we who are Black built this country.

Born in Nashville to architect William DeBerry McKissack and teacher Leatrice Buchanan McKissack, Daniel is the fifth generation of McKissacks involved in this century-old enterprise. To keep it afloat required that her mother dissolve the old entity to buy out envious outsiders skeptical about a woman’s ability to thrive in such a male-dominated environment.

“It was a learning process,” Daniel explained when Robinson asked how she overcame being second-guessed and underestimated as a Black woman. “Mistakes were made all along the way, but they are teaching moments. At Tuskegee once, to her horror, Mom learned that for our new building, we’d specified windows that didn’t open to alleviate the stifling climate. It was my turn to be shocked when I heard her respond, ‘Don’t worry, it’s our error. I’ll make good on getting you windows that open.’ ‘How could she say that,’ I thought, ‘there goes all our profit’? But walking across the campus with the college president, noticing a tumbling-down old building, informed it was about to be razed, Mom requested a tour. At the sight of each arch and every column, Mom exclaimed, ‘This is great. There are wonderful things we can do here. This should be your new president’s house!’ Within a week of returning home, she had a letter inviting her to do the job.”

Daniel continued, “My family has been at this for nearly 200 years, building thousands of structures across the United States, establishing the McKissack name as the most prolific Black builders the country has ever seen … McKissacks have built it all. America wouldn’t look like America without us.”

Asked what’s been essential to having done so well, Daniel stressed the importance of acting strategically and cultivating allies. “You have to work your agenda and to identify who’s working your agenda, too. My father always backed the winner of any political contest. I asked him, ‘Daddy, how do you always know who will win?’ He said, ‘Baby, ‘I’m not a Republican or a Democrat; I’m an Afrocrat!”

The audience erupted with laughter.

As with every personal conversation with the buyers of all the books she signed afterward, Cheryl McKissack Daniel won new friends who are working her agenda of spreading Black excellence.