Background
Pittman was born April 21, 1875, in Montgomery, Alabama, to a laundress who was ex-slave woman and a prominent white man of the city.
Pittman was born April 21, 1875, in Montgomery, Alabama, to a laundress who was ex-slave woman and a prominent white man of the city.
At the age of 17 Pittman attended Tuskegee Institute, where he completed programs in woodwork and architectural-mechanical drawing in 1897. He was awarded a scholarship to attend the all-white Drexel Institute in Philadelphia, where he completed the five-year architecture and mechanical drawing program in only three years, graduating in 1900, after which he returned to Tuskegee to teach for the next five years.
He was the son-in-law of Booker T. Washington. Pittmann designed a number of buildings for the Tuskegee Institute, including Collis P. Huntington Memorial Building, Tuskegee, Alabama (1900-1905). He then moved to Washington, District of Columbia, and developed his own successful architectural practice, receiving many important commissions.
He developed the Fairmount Heights housing development for blacks in the suburbs of Maryland.
She returned to teach in Tuskegee. He quit the practice of architecture, working as a skilled carpenter.
Foreign most of the next two decades he published an opinionated and controversial weekly paper called The Brotherhood Eyes, a dissident voice in the African-American community that was an alternative to mainstream newspapers such as the Dallas Weekly or the Dallas Express. In the paper he attacked what he saw as failures among the local preachers and other black leaders, gaining himself many enemies.
Pittman died March 14, 1958, in Dallas, where he is buried in Glen Oaks Cemetery.