Left: Madison at the groundbreaking of the Park Place apartments on East Boulevard, circa 1967. Above: Madison,with his brothers Julian
and Bernard, flanked by their friend Jessie Strickland, at the groundbreaking of the Mount Pleasant Medical Center.
Leatrice had a master’s degree in teaching — at the time called Educational Guidance. She urged Bob to get a master’s as
well. And why not? The G.I. Bill, signed into law in 1944, would pay the tuition, as it had at WRU. For a vast number of World
War II veterans, black and white, the G.I. Bill was their ticket to success. Millions of veterans used it for higher education and job
training programs. It created the largest prosperous middle class America had ever seen.
By early 1951, Madison was at Harvard with Walter Gropius. He finished a year later, and returned to Howard University to
teach. While he was there, he was awarded a Fulbright Scholarship to study at École des Beaux-Arts in Paris for a year. He and
Leatrice returned to Howard for a brief time, then came back to Cleveland, where he opened his practice.
There was no real work forthcoming until another group of African-American professionals who were shunned by their
white counterparts approached him. Madison accepted a commission from a group of black doctors who were routinely denied
office space, and the Mount Pleasant Medical Center at East 139th Street and Kinsman Road came into being in 1957. The
building won an American Institute of Architects design award.
That was followed by the Medical Association Building at East 105th Street and Ashbury Avenue, near the Cleveland Cultural
Gardens, and a commission from the AME Church — the first Protestant denomination to be founded by blacks — to be its
official architect. Madison built AME churches across the country.
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