The library is one of three remaining Birkerts buildings that were part of his ambitious masterplan, which largely would have obliterated all traces of the campus’s physical history. The principals’ natural predilection helped them empathize with clients for whom an architecture of pedimented, white-columned porticos was anathema, a sign of America’s “original sin.” The relation of their clients to the larger body politic created an unexpected opportunity for the architects: their rejection of design tropes easily associated with the oppression of America’s underclass appealed to clients inherently open to progressive agendas, in contrast to what one tends to encounter in the architecture culture of Mississippi’s capital city.ĭuvall Decker’s initial work at Tougaloo was to complete the college’s campus master plan and assess its library, a Brutalist building designed by the Latvian/American architect Gunnar Birkerts. Moreover, the bulk of their work for school districts, both urban and rural, is with communities of color or for economically disadvantaged communities. More than a third of Duvall Decker’s institutional work is with Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs). It required trust-building across time and racial, cultural, and socioeconomic boundaries, into a place apart.ĭuring the past two decades, Duvall Decker Architects has traversed its own lengthy arc, largely owing to a significant portion of the firm’s widely varied client base being committed to issues of social justice and racial equity. Decker grew up in New Jersey, and Duvall is from western Tennessee. One of the thorniest challenges confronting Anne Marie Duvall and Roy Decker, both of whom are white, was their place of origin: it was neither Jackson, which is 80% Black, nor Mississippi. Three years later, many of the same leaders came together at the center to mark the 50th anniversary of the 1964 Freedom Summer, credited with President Johnson’s promoting and signing the Civil Rights Act the later event was planned and designed in Duvall Decker’s office.ĭuval Decker’s Thompson Center is about “remaining awake” architecturally, as many of us wait for that long arc to bend toward justice. In 2011, several of the remaining leaders of the civil rights era gathered to commemorate the opening of the Thompson Center, among them the great Lewis, then a U.S. Bennie Thompson, an undergraduate majoring in political science at the time, met Dr.

King, John Lewis, and other luminaries of the civil rights movement walked with James Meredith’s “ March Against Fear ” through Tougaloo’s ceremonial entrance the college invited the protesters to rest at the campus before the march’s conclusion the following day, when approximately 15,000 mostly Black civil rights champions protested at Mississippi’s Capitol, in Jackson. In his “ Remaining Awake Through a Great Revolution ” speech at Washington, D.C.’s National Cathedral, he made more eloquent the words of the 19th-century American abolitionist Theodore Parker: “We shall overcome because the arc of the moral universe is long but it bends toward justice.” Photograph from the Tougaloo College Archives. politicized rhetoric of a different sort. Four days before his assassination at the Lorraine Hotel in Memphis, Tennessee, Dr. Capitol.Įvents such as January 6, 2021, remind us of the power of political rhetoric.

Congressman Thompson, an alumnus of Tougaloo, has represented Mississippi’s Second District for 28 years he is currently chairing the House January 6th Committee investigating the insurrection and attack on the U.S.

Thompson Academic & Civil Rights Research Center at Tougaloo College in Jackson, Mississippi, designed by Duvall Decker Architects. This year marks the 10th anniversary of the Bennie G.

Eloquent words for a front porch