Tuskegee Institute National Historic Site
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N 32° 25.666 W 085° 42.318
16S E 621724 N 3588589
Tuskegee University is a private, historically black university located in Tuskegee, Alabama, United States. It is a member school of the Thurgood Marshall Scholarship Fund.
Waymark Code: WM7XEG
Location: Alabama, United States
Date Posted: 12/18/2009
Views: 3
The campus forms the Tuskegee Institute National Historic Site, a National Historic Landmark.
The school was the dream of Lewis Adams, a former slave and George W. Campbell, a former slave owner. Adams could read, write and speak several languages despite having no formal education. He also was an experienced tinsmith, harness-maker and shoemaker and Prince Hall Freemason, an acknowledged leader of the African-American community in Macon County, Alabama.
During Reconstruction, the period following the American Civil War, the South was impoverished. Many blacks were illiterate and had few employable job skills. Adams was especially concerned that, without an education, the recently freed former slaves would not be able to support themselves. Campbell, of like-thinking, had become a merchant and a banker. He had little experience with educational institutions, but he was willing to contribute all of his resources and efforts to make the school a success.
W.F. Foster, a white candidate for the Alabama Senate, came to Adams with a question. What would Adams want in return for securing the votes of African Americans in Macon County for Foster and another white candidate? In response, Adams asked for a normal school for the free men, freed slaves and their children (a normal school, at that time, was the name for a teacher's college) to be established in the area.
Foster and the other candidate were elected. He worked with the fellow legislator Arthur L. Brooks to draft and pass legislation authorizing $2,000 to create the school. Adams, Thomas Dyer, and M.B. Swanson formed Tuskegee's first board of commissioners. They wrote to Hampton Institute in Virginia, asking the school to recommend someone to head their new school. Former Union Army General and Hampton Principal Samuel C. Armstrong felt that he knew just the man for the job: 25 year-old Booker T. Washington.
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