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.