Tuskegee, Alabama

Tuskegee, Alabama
City
The Macon County Courthouse in Tuskegee was added to the National Register of Historic Places on November 17, 1987.
Flag Seal
Nickname:  Thou Pride of the Swift Growing South
Location in Macon County, Alabama
Tuskegee, Alabama Location in the United States
Coordinates: 32°25′53″N 85°42′24″W / 32.43139°N 85.70667°W / 32.43139; -85.70667
Country	United States
State	Alabama
County	Macon
Government
• Mayor	Lawrence F. Haygood, Jr.
Area [1]
• Total	17.33 sq mi (44.89 km2)
• Land	17.06 sq mi (44.19 km2)
• Water	0.27 sq mi (0.70 km2)
Elevation	463 ft (141 m)
Population  (2020)[2]
• Total	9,395
• Density	550.7/sq mi (212.63/km2)
Time zone	UTC-6 (CST)
• Summer (DST)	UTC-5 (CDT)
ZIP codes	36083, 36087, 36088
Area code	334
FIPS code	01-77304
GNIS feature ID	0128211
Website	tuskegeealabama.gov

Tuskegee (/tʌˈskiːɡi/ tuh-SKEE-ghee^[3]) is a city in Macon County, Alabama, United States. General Thomas Simpson Woodward, a Creek War veteran under Andrew Jackson, laid out the city and founded it in 1833. It became the county seat in the same year and it was incorporated in 1843.^[4] It is the most populous city in Macon County. At the 2020 census the population was 9,395,^[2] down from 9,865 in 2010 and 11,846 in 2000.

Tuskegee has been important in African-American history and highly influential in United States history since the 19th century.^{[peacock prose]} 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 had allowed him to be educated. Its first founding principal was Booker T. Washington, who developed a national reputation and philanthropic network to support 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.^[5]

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.^[6] The city's boundaries were restored in 1961 after the ruling.