Afro-American architecture developed from colonial times in the Caribbean and the Americas, where slave and free black artisans created building designs based on West African forms. On farms and plantations, slaves built housing of mud, straw, and thatch in the form of a village hut, a narrow rectangular habitat with an arched doorway, stucco walls, and a thatched roof. Slaves added shuttered windows and doors to foster privacy and togetherness. They frequently arranged houses in the “basic bubble diagram” of an African tribal compound. Houses had gabled roofs, which allowed air inside and provided covers for porches, as well as conical roofs supported by posts. A “shotgun house,” from the African word shogun or “God's house,” was a linear wooden structure of two rooms and a gabled front porch. Alongside planning and constructing plantation mansions, blacks helped to design and construct public structures and sites throughout the nation. Free-born Benjamin Banneker assisted with the 1791 site assessment for the District of Columbia. Bondman Horace King, who was granted freedom, designed river bridges in Georgia and South Carolina. After the Civil War, shotgun houses sheltered millions of all races. Black architects emerged in the South as freedmen and women pooled their resources to build homes, churches, schools, lodge halls, and community centers. Negro colleges, for example, soon began programs to train draftsmen, probably the earliest being an “architecture certificate” program at Tuskegee Institute in 1892. Hampton Institute and Howard University followed suit after 1900. Tuskegee's students planned and constructed more than forty campus auditoriums and dormitories by 1915. They drew blueprints for the Carnegie Libraries Project and Rosenwald School Building Program. In the meantime, the graduates contracted other notable projects.

Architecture graduates advanced little by little. Tuskegee graduate Jewel V. W. Tandy became New York State's first black licensed architect in 1908. The next year he opened Tandy & Foster, Architects in New York City. The all-white American Institute of Architects (AIA) barred black membership, but Tandy and others formed parallel associations, including the National Builders Association (1923) and the National Technical Association (1929).

Such groups inspired and paralleled a number of African American firsts. Urban designer Robert R. Taylor graduated valedictorian from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology School of Architecture in 1892.