Robert Charles Bates
American architect (1869–1950)
Robert Charles Bates (January 27, 1869 – May 2, 1950), commonly known as R. Charles Bates, was an American architect, educator, and textbook author. He was an African-American architect and helped design and build many of the Claflin University campus buildings, a historically black university (HBU) in South Carolina. He is thought to the first Black teacher of architecture at a HBU; and the first African- American author of an architecture textbook.
Early life and family
Robert Charles Bates was born on January 27, 1869, in Kingsville (or Kingville), a rural community outside of the city of Columbia in Richland County, South Carolina. Many of the details of his life have conflicting records. Some records show his birth as c. 1872, in Columbia, South Carolina.
It is thought that he took a correspondence course in mechanical drawing (possibly from Scranton Correspondence School in Scranton, Pennsylvania). Bates studied architecture and engineering under Thomas William Silloway of Boston, from 1885 to 1893. He attended Claflin University's Normal School (which was connected to the University of South Carolina at the time) to become a teacher, and graduated with a MA degree in 1888.
Bates married Maybelle Dean from Elmira, New York, and together they had five children.
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This entry incorporates text from “Robert Charles Bates” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.