Tuskegee: Where Booker T. Washington Built a World

In the summer of eighteen eighty-one, Booker T. Washington arrived in Tuskegee, Alabama, with a state appropriation of two thousand dollars a year and nothing else. No land. No buildings. No equipment. The Alabama legislature had allocated money for faculty salaries at a new school for Black students in Macon County, but had not thought to provide anything to teach in.

Washington had grown up enslaved in Virginia. He had worked in salt furnaces and coal mines after emancipation to earn his way to Hampton Institute, the vocational school in Virginia that became his model. What he built in Tuskegee over the next thirty-four years was something that model could barely contain.

He bought land. He had his students make the bricks and raise the buildings themselves, not as a cost-saving measure but as a pedagogical one. A student who built a kiln understood construction from the inside. Washington believed that economic self-sufficiency would earn Black Americans the respect and security that political agitation could not yet secure. His philosophy was controversial among Black leaders. W.E.B. Du Bois argued directly against it, but the institution he built was undeniable.

In eighteen ninety-six he recruited George Washington Carver from Iowa State to lead the agriculture department. Carver spent the next forty-seven years in Tuskegee developing crop rotation techniques, alternative uses for peanuts and sweet potatoes, and practical farming methods designed specifically for the poor Southern tenant farmer chained to exhausted cotton soil. By the time Carver was done, he had transformed how the South grew food.

Then in nineteen forty-one came the Tuskegee Airmen. The Army Air Corps, forced by political pressure to train Black pilots, established its segregated training program here. Nearly one thousand Black pilots trained at Tuskegee Army Air Field. The three-hundred-thirty-second Fighter Group flew one hundred seventy-nine bomber escort missions over Europe. On only seven of those missions did enemy fighters shoot down an escorted bomber, a combat record that made the Red Tails legendary and made the argument for military integration impossible to refute.