Julian Francis Abele was an African-American architect from Philadelphia. He was born in 1881 at a time when racial injustice and segregation were still the status quo. Abele attended the Pennsylvania Museum School of Industrial Art, where he finished a two-year architectural drawing class in 1898. By 1902, he was the first African-American to graduate from the architecture program at the University of Pennsylvania. By 1909, he had become the chief designer for Horace Trumbauer, an architect who had started his own firm in Philadelphia.