Norma Merrick Sklarek (1926-2012)
Filed under the name Norma · February 2, 2026
Norma Merrick Sklarek became the first Black woman in the country to earn an architecture license, and I read her story with the particular recognition of someone who was one of very few Black women in her own doctoral cohort at Cornell decades ago, in a different but comparably narrow field. Having a hand in designing a passenger terminal at one of the country's busiest airports is an achievement measurable on its own considerable merits, entirely apart from the barrier she broke to be allowed to do it, and I insist, in my own writing, on giving both facts their proper, separate weight rather than letting one eclipse the other. I mentored dozens of students who wanted to be first in some room that was not built expecting them, and I always told them that being first is necessary but not sufficient — the actual work still has to hold up under scrutiny for decades afterward. Sklarek's buildings still stand and still function, which is, in the end, the only rebuttal that ever fully satisfies the skeptics.