For years, rumor had it that the archive of the Los Angeles architect Paul Revere Williams, who died in 1980, was destroyed by fire during the 1992 riots in the city. Williams’s files were stored in the basement of the Broadway Federal Savings and Loan building — one of thousands of buildings he had designed during his pioneering 50-year career as the city’s most successful Black architect. When police officers were acquitted of using excessive force against Rodney King and the building went up in flames, people assumed documentation of his life’s work did as well.

As it happens, just a few file cabinets, mainly containing business records, were destroyed. The remainder of the estate was safeguarded in the family home, under the care of his widow and then with his granddaughter, Karen E. Hudson.

In time Hudson would show the material to Maristella Casciato, curator of architecture at the Getty Research Institute, and Le Ronn P. Brooks, who leads its African American Art History Initiative. The Getty curators met Hudson at a storage unit at the Grove, the popular mall, in early 2020 and remember the thrill of unrolling one meticulous Williams drawing after another.

In all, there were original drawings, renderings, plans or blueprints for about 1,800 projects, which the Getty soon acquired in a joint agreement with the architect’s alma mater, the University of Southern California (U.S.C.). Now, for the first time, these curators from the Getty, joined by others from U.S.C. and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA), are using this material to help tell a richer and deeper story of a Black architect who broke the color barrier in Southern California by building a thriving practice — and extraordinary homes, hospitals and more — despite the overt racism of his time. Each institution is staging its own show this season on Williams: the USC Fisher Museum of Art’s opened Aug. 18; LACMA’s opens on Nov. 15; and the Getty’s on Dec. 15.

Most of the curators admitted they had not heard of Williams until they moved to California. “Our hope is that going forward you won’t be able to write a history of American architecture without Paul R. Williams,” Brooks said. Williams designed some of his greatest estates in Bel Air and Beverly Hills in the 1930s and ’40s, when he could not own property in the area because of racially restrictive covenants written into property deeds.

He couldn’t even use the front door of some of his buildings. “The logo of the Beverly Hills Hotel is in his handwriting, but he couldn’t walk into the front door there,” Brooks said. “He even kept his hands in his pockets when walking through construction sites, because he knew some construction workers wouldn’t want to shake his hand.” Williams’s most famous flex: He taught himself to draw upside down, so he could sit across from white clients uncomfortable sitting next to a Black man. Or as he noted in an essay from 1937, “The weight of my racial handicap forced me, willy-nilly, to develop salesmanship.” Raised in a diverse neighborhood in downtown Los Angeles, Williams had a talent for drawing and dreamed of becoming an architect early on. After high school, he studied design at different art schools and engineering at U.S.C. before taking an entry-level architecture job in 1919.

He obtained his license in 1921 and two years later became a member of the American Institute of Architects (A. I. A.), its first documented Black member.

He built his business designing dream homes for powerful clients, including Barbara Stanwyck, Bert Lahr, Frank Sinatra, Lucille Ball and Desi Arnaz. Hudson published a lavish coffee table book with Rizzoli in 2012 that helped establish his work in this area. But the new exhibitions plan to go beyond his reputation as “architect to the stars.”.