Elevate Something Ordinary to Something Extraordinary.

Justice By Design

To look at the dates and the places of Mockbee's upbringing, you would not necessarily assume that he would be such a tireless fighter for racial equality -- which is partly why, in Mockbee's world, assumptions are wrong more often than they are right. A fifth-generation Mississippian, born in the town of Meridian in 1944, Mockbee grew up on the white side of a segregated society. His father contracted tuberculosis during Mockbee's youth; Mockbee, his sister, and his mother were supported primarily by his paternal grandmother, Sweet Tee, whose flair in both her manner and her wardrobe influenced Mockbee at a young age.

Mockbee did not do particularly well in school. "I was an athlete and a daydreamer," he says. Mockbee's school was academically excellent -- and all white. "You couldn't buy my education in Meridian from 1950 to 1963," he says. "That faculty was as good as any college faculty today, and it was because money was being spent on white children and not on black children."

Mockbee knew black people, but never as equals. "They came in the back door, and they were maids, or they were caddies at the country club," he says.

It was not until 1966, when Mockbee was drafted by the U.S. Army during his junior year at Auburn, that he was forced to confront his own conflicted feelings about race. For the first several weeks of training camp in Fort Benning, Georgia, he remembers, "Whenever I was standing in line, I'd be sure a white person was in front of me and behind me. When I sat down to eat, I'd have a white person on either side of me and across from me. Then one day I fell asleep in a rifle-range class. When I woke up, I was in the middle of all these black trainees who were also from Mississippi. I was fine, in a nest of equals. I thought, Why have I been worried? I went back to sleep, and the race thing ceased to exist for me."

Since then, Mockbee's liberal viewpoint has not wavered. In conversation, he regularly rails against various forms of hypocrisy and injustice and against those who perpetuate them, whom he calls "Bubbas." Mockbee says, "When my daughters went off to school, I told them, 'You can do anything you want to. Do drugs, raise hell -- as long as your grades are good. But don't you come back as a goddamned conservative.' " So far, his daughters, one of whom is in law school at the University of Mississippi and two of whom are undergraduates at Auburn, have complied. "They're all good, liberal Democrats," he says. "All three of them are going to be president of the United States." As for his son, who is 15 years old, Mockbee is less certain. "My wife, Jackie, says that he's a chip off the old butt," Mockbee says, laughing. "I don't know what he's going to be."

Mockbee first combined his social concerns with his love of architecture in 1982. In the town of Canton, Mississippi -- where Mockbee and his family still live, though Mockbee himself is away much of the time -- Mockbee heard about a Catholic nun named Sister Grace Mary, who was trying to move some houses away from a flood district. Mockbee called the nun (though he's quick to mention that he's not Catholic but "Christian by birth, Buddhist by philosophy, and heathen by nature") and helped her with the project. She then told him about a family that was living -- precariously, she felt -- in a shack where all seven of the children had been born.

"I said, 'Why don't we build a house using donated labor and materials?' " Mockbee recalls. "And we did: We built a house that was a little more than a thousand square feet for about $7,000. It had three bedrooms, a bathroom, a kitchen, and a loft space." At that point, Mockbee was working at an architecture firm that he had founded in 1977, and he and several colleagues worked on the house for eight months during the weekends. "Having had that experience, I knew that small projects like that were doable by ordinary people," Mockbee says. "It wasn't so complicated that a person of average intelligence couldn't build something. Just because you haven't done something before doesn't mean that you can't get it done. The main thing is, you've got to want to do it."

By then, Mockbee very much wanted to do it. He applied for a grant to build three more houses for needy families in Canton, but his proposal was turned down. Professionally, his life was full -- he was working on an acoustics lab and on an observatory on the Ole Miss campus -- but his desire to make his work more socially relevant was unfulfilled. In 1990, Mockbee visited an architecture program for American students in Genoa, Italy that was sponsored by Clemson University. He was taken with the camaraderie of the students, and he found himself wondering whether such a program could exist in the South -- a place whose rich history and whose sense of architecture, Mockbee felt, certainly rivaled Italy's. The following year, in 1991, Mockbee began teaching at Auburn. In 1993, he obtained a $250,000 grant from the Alabama Power Foundation and headed to Greensboro with 12 students in tow.