BlackFacts.com presents the black fact of the day for April 15.

Birthday of Norma Merrick Sklarek.

She was the first African American woman to pass her license exam to officially become an architect in both New York and California.

Sklarek graduated from Columbia in 1950 with a B.Arch., one of two women and the only African American in her class.

After this, she faced discrimination in her search for work as an architect, applying to and being rejected by nineteen firms.

In 1959, she became the first African American woman member of the American Institute of Architects.

In 1960, she took a job at Gruen Associates and became responsible for hiring and overseeing staff architects and coordinating technical aspects of major projects, including the California Mart, Fox Plaza, and the U.S. Embassy in Tokyo.

In 1980, Sklarek was the first African American woman elected to the College of Fellows of the American Institute of Architects for her outstanding contributions to the profession, the first woman in the Los Angeles AIA chapter to be awarded this honor.

She has been called the “Rosa Parks of architecture.”

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