Tuskegee, Forty Miles East
Near Montgomery, Alabama
About forty miles east of Montgomery, in Macon County, sits Tuskegee, Alabama. The two cities are connected in ways that shaped American history.
Tuskegee Normal School opened on July fourth, eighteen eighty-one. Its founding was the result of a political arrangement made the previous year between a former Confederate colonel named Wilbur Foster and a local Black community leader named Lewis Adams, who agreed to deliver Black votes in exchange for state funding for an institution of higher education for Black Alabamians. The state legislature allocated two thousand dollars a year for salaries. There was no building, no land, no equipment.
The man sent to build the school was Booker T. Washington, twenty-five years old, a former enslaved person who had educated himself at the Hampton Institute in Virginia. Washington arrived to find nothing. He borrowed space from a Black church and a shanty. He purchased a former one hundred-acre plantation the following year on credit, and his students built the buildings with their own labor.
Under Washington, Tuskegee became one of the most influential educational institutions in the United States. George Washington Carver joined the faculty in eighteen ninety-six and spent nearly fifty years there conducting agricultural research that transformed Southern farming, including foundational work on the peanut, sweet potato, and crop rotation systems that allowed depleted cotton soil to recover.
The Tuskegee Airmen, the first Black military aviators in the United States Army Air Corps, trained at Moton Field in Tuskegee during World War Two. More than nine hundred pilots were certified there between nineteen forty-one and nineteen forty-six.
Tuskegee University is a National Historic Landmark. The relationship between Montgomery and its nearest HBCU runs through a century and a half of Alabama history.
