Tuskegee, Alabama

Tuskegee (/tʌˈskiːɡi/ tuh-SKEE-ghee) is a city in Macon County, Alabama, United States. The population was 9,395 at the 2020 census, and was estimated to be 8,765 in 2023. It is the most populous city in Macon County.

Creek War General Thomas Simpson Woodward founded the city in 1833. 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, white slave owner Jesse Adams, had 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.

The name "Tuskegee" comes from Spanish "Tasquiqui", which came from the Muskogee word "Taskeke", meaning "warriors". The Native American town of Tasquique was located on the Chattahoochee River just south of present-day Columbus, Georgia.

The Creek people long occupied this area, including a settlement known as Taskigi Town. After Congress passed the Indian Removal Act of 1830 in furtherance of U.S. President Andrew Jackson's goals, most of the Creek bands were removed from their homelands in the Southeast to Indian Territory west of the Mississippi River. Pioneer white planters and other migrants moved into the area, mostly from eastern Southern states. The planters brought or purchased enslaved African Americans to clear woods and develop cotton plantations. Invention of the cotton gin had made short-staple cotton profitable to process, and it became the chief commodity crop of the Deep South through the 19th century.

General Thomas Simpson Woodward, a Creek War veteran under Jackson, laid out the city in 1833. It became the county seat in the same year, and it was incorporated on February 13, 1843.

In 1881, the young Booker T. Washington was hired to develop the Tuskegee Normal School for Colored Teachers on the grounds of a former plantation. It was founded to train teachers for the segregated school system and freedmen for self-sufficiency. Washington established a work-study program by which students practiced skills and trades. Over the decades, the programs were expanded. This was later named the Tuskegee Institute. Graduate courses were added and it became Tuskegee University.