Samuel Plato was an African American architect that lived and worked in Marion, Indiana between 1902 and 1921. He was born in Alabama in 1882 when Jim Crow laws legalized segregation and often incited racial violence. He broke racial barriers by graduating from State University Normal School in Louisville in 1902.[1] He was a member of Phi Beta Sigma, an African American fraternity. He then completed a program in architecture with International Correspondence Schools.[2]  
 
Plato moved to Marion in 1902 to work as an architect, at a time when the Ku Klux Klan recorded around half a million of members in Indiana.[3] He quickly found support from wealthy Marion business owners John Schaumleffel and J. Woodrow Wilson.[4] Plato worked to open up building trade unions in Marion to African American workers, who were previously excluded from the unions.[5] Plato was the first African American architect to acquire a government contract to build a post office, and during his career, he would build 38 post offices across the country.[6] He promoted social progress in a white-dominated field by hiring both black and white workers on his projects, creating training and jobs for African Americans.[7] 

His most notable works in Indiana included the J. Woodrow Wilson House, completed in 1922. This 15-room mansion, located in Marion, was built for business owner J. Woodrow Wilson. It has also been known as the Hostess House and the Wilson-Vaughan House.[8] Plato designed the Second Baptist Church in Bloomington which opened in 1913 and was “the first church built of stone by African Americans in Indiana.”[9] He also designed the Swallow-Robin dormitory at Taylor University in Upland. This building was slated for demolition in 1986 until it was found that Plato was the architect.[10] His success as an architect and his fight for equality in the business sector brought him fame throughout Indiana. In August 1913, the Indianapolis African American newspaper from Indianapolis The Freeman described Plato as a “colored man engaged in business (…), a contractor, who has built some of the finest houses in Marion.”[11]  

In the early 1920s, Plato returned to Louisville, Kentucky to continue his architectural career. While there, Plato built the Temple AME Zion Church[12] and the Virginia Avenue Colored School[13], both on the National Register for Historic Places. During World War II, Plato moved back to Alabama.[14] During this time, he was one of the few black contractors to build federal housing projects.[15] His work was acknowledged and rewarded by First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt in 1943 while she was on an inspection tour of federal dormitories for war workers in Washington, D.C.[16] Plato revolutionized the architecture field by helping to end racial discrimination in architecture and the building trades.  

His projects changed the face of Marion and Indiana. The Freeman, declared, “There is no more successful contractor in Grant County, yes, I dare say Indiana, than Mr. Plato.”[17] Two of his Indiana buildings, the Wilson-Vaughan home in Marion[18] and Second Baptist Church in Bloomington[19] are on the National Register of Historic Places. He is honored with an Indiana Historical Bureau marker in Marion that emphasizes his work securing equal rights for African American workers in the building trades.[20]