Originally published in Aperture x The Vision and Justice Project, 2019

A tour of Harvard University feels like a stroll through a phone book. When I first visited it in high school, our guide led us from site to site, reciting an ocean of names from the university’s rich history. Some were familiar—George Washington, John F. Kennedy—and the rest would become commonplace a few years later when I became a student myself. However, it takes even longer to excavate those names that have been omitted. While most students know the mythic history of Widener Library’s namesake, few know about one of the library’s designers, Julian Abele, a prominent African American architect.

In 1902, Abele was the first black graduate of the University of Pennsylvania’s Department of Architecture. Four years later, he joined a firm led by Horace Trumbauer, where he rose to the position of chief designer in just three years. But while Abele contributed to over four hundred designs, the attributions still fell to Trumbauer. So, while the family of Harry Elkins Widener selected Trumbauer—a family friend who designed many Widener mansions— to create Harvard’s library, Abele played a significant role in the design.

“The lines are all Mr. Trumbauer’s,” Abele said of his work on the Free Library in Philadelphia, “but the shadows are all mine.”

Indeed, the shadows of Abele continue to linger over the spaces he designed.

During the 1986 protests against Duke University’s investments in apartheid South Africa, students erected shanties in front of Duke Chapel—a building, like Widener Library, with a soaring stature that dominates the campus. And like Widener, the chapel—in addition to Duke’s library, football stadium, gym, medical school, religion school, hospital, and faculty houses—was designed by Abele beyond the public’s awareness. As the crude protest structures arose, other students protested the shacks themselves, claiming a violation to their “rights as students to a beautiful campus.” Susan Cook, a student and Abele’s great-grandniece, responded in a written statement, claiming her great-granduncle “was a victim of apartheid” in this country and would have supported the divestment as well.

Cook’s letter was the first time Abele’s role had been so publicly acknowledged by the school, surprising even Duke’s administration. But Abele’s absence from the consciousness of Duke was much more than just a technicality. At Duke, Abele constructed a world in which he could not belong. While his conception of Duke’s buildings is recorded in the university’s archives, it is unclear whether or not Abele ever set foot on campus.

Almost a century after his career ended, Abele has started to emerge from the shadows of his work. Duke has taken significant steps to rectify his obscurity; in 2016, the school named the campus’s main area (to which Duke Chapel sits adjacent) Abele Quad. At Harvard, the process is just beginning.