Welcome to Tuskegee!
Tuskegee is in the River Heritage area, and the county seat of Macon County, Alabama. Tuskegee is an important place in African American and American history.
Tuskegee is a city in Macon County, Alabama, United States. It was founded and laid out in 1833 by General Thomas Simpson Woodward, a Creek War veteran under Andrew Jackson, and made the county seat that year. It was incorporated in 1843. It is the largest city in Macon County. At the 2010 census the population was 9,865, down from 11,846 in 2000.
Tuskegee has been important in African-American history and highly influential in United States history since the 19th century. Before the American Civil War, the area was developed for cotton plantations, dependent on enslaved African-American people.
After the war, many freedmen continued to work on plantations in the rural area, which was devoted to agriculture, primarily cotton as a commodity crop. In 1881 the Tuskegee Normal School (now Tuskegee University, a historically black college) was founded by Lewis Adams, a former slave whose father, Jesse Adams, a white slave owner, allowed him to be educated. Its first founding principal was Booker T. Washington, who developed a national reputation and philanthropic network to support the education of freedmen and their children.
In 1923, the Tuskegee Veterans Administration Medical Center was established, initially for the estimated 300,000 African-American veterans of World War I in the South, when public facilities were racially segregated. Twenty-seven buildings were constructed on the 464-acre campus. The city was the subject of a civil rights case, Gomillion v. Lightfoot (1960), in which the United States Supreme Court ruled that the state legislature had violated the Fifteenth Amendment in 1957 by gerrymandering city boundaries as a 28-sided figure that excluded nearly all black voters and residents, and none of the white voters or residents. The city's boundaries were restored in 1961 after the ruling.