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 of Tuskegee, Alabama
Coordinates: 32°25′26.50″N 85°41′29.83″W / 32.4240278°N 85.6916194°W / 32.4240278; -85.6916194
Country	United States
State	Alabama
County	Macon
Founded	1833
Incorporated	February 13, 1843[1]
Government [2]
• Type	Mayor–Council
• Mayor	Lawrence F. Haygood, Jr.
• Councilmembers	Norma McGowan Jackson Johnny Ford Orlando Whitehead
• At Large	Frank Christopher Lee, II
Area [3]
• City	17.331 sq mi (44.887 km2)
• Land	17.060 sq mi (44.185 km2)
• Water	0.271 sq mi (0.702 km2)
Elevation [4]	463 ft (141 m)
Population  (2020)[5]
• City	9,395
• Estimate  (2023)[6]	8,765
• Density	513.85/sq mi (198.39/km2)
• Urban	9,003
• Metro	18,370
Time zone	UTC−6 (Central (CST))
• Summer (DST)	UTC−5 (CDT)
ZIP Code	36083
Area code	334
FIPS code	01-77304
GNIS feature ID	0128211[4]
Sales tax	11.5%[7]
Website	tuskegeealabama.gov

Tuskegee (/tʌˈskiːɡi/ tuh-SKEE-ghee^[8]) 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 on February 13, 1843.^[9] It is the most populous city in Macon County. The population was 9,395 at the 2020 census,^[5] and was estimated to be 8,765 in 2023.^[6]

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.^[10]

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.^[11] The city's boundaries were restored in 1961 after the ruling.