After Drexel, 1900-1958
Pittman graduated from Drexel and returned to Tuskegee where he taught and paid back the loan for living expenses he received from Washington and the Tuskegee Institute. After a dispute over his salary, he moved to Washington D.C. in 1905 where he worked for African American architect, John Lankford. Just a few months later he established his own office. In the fall of 1906, he entered and won the competition to design the Negro Building at the Jamestown Ter-Centennial Exposition.
His dispute with Washington over his salary at Tuskegee apparently did not harm their relationship. Pittman married Washington’s daughter, Portia, in 1907 assuring him a permanent connection with his mentor.
Pittman’s major commissions while in Washington included the Garfield Elementary Public School and the 12th Street Y.M.C.A, a segregated facility for African Americans.
Pittman relocated to Texas in 1912 after being awarded a series of contracts in the South becoming (what many claim) Dallas' first African American architect. While in Texas he designed a Carnegie funded library in Houston and the Knights of Pythias Temple in the heart of Dallas’ Deep Ellum district.
Pittman's main body of work in the 1910s was on African American churches, schools, and fraternal organizations. After World War I, Pittman’s reputation as being recalcitrant and diffucult to work with began to take a toll on his professional and personal life.
By 1926, Pittman had completed his final project as an architect. With his career in decline, his wife left him in 1928, no longer able to live with Pittman’s bitterness and anger. Pittman made a living as a carpenter and in 1931 he started a scandal sheet for the African American community called the Brotherhood Eyes. The paper became an outlet for Pittman’s resentment toward the local and regional leaders in the African American community who he blamed for his failures. The attacks landed Pittman in federal court in 1936, charged with sending obscene material across state line (a charge thought easier to prove then libel.) In 1937, he was convicted and sentenced to five years in prison. On his release, he returned to Dallas where he worked as a carpenter until his death in 1958.
Unknown and forgotten at the time of his death, his accomplishments have only recently come to light. Many of his commissions have been identified and now stand as designated historic buildings. The historian Susan G. Pearl wrote in 1994, “Pittman was not an important architectural innovator,” but “because of his talent, ambition, and industry, William Sidney Pittman made a place for himself [in] a field that was just opening to African Americans.”
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Documents and Images
Negro Building Jamestown Exposition, 1907
"The Pride of Sidney Pittman," Dallas Times Herald, 1985
List of William Sidney Pittman's buildings
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