Amid Alabama Farm Fields, a Citadel of Black Learning Shines

Aerospace, bioethics programs burnish Tuskegee University's luster

26 February 2010

White Hall, one of many Tuskegee University buildings constructed by the hands of students, opened in 1909. Its clock tower is a campus landmark.

In 1881, a 25-year-old former slave from Virginia used a $2,000 gift to open a one-room teacher-training school in one of the poorest rural counties in the southern state of Alabama. This man and his school, that began in a church basement, would become American legends.

The man was Booker T. Washington, who at the turn of the 20th Century succeeded another former slave, the fiery orator Frederick Douglass, as the recognized voice of black America. The school, which at first had no money for land or buildings, grew into the world-renowned Tuskegee Institute, a college for those whom no one else wanted to educate: African Americans in the backwoods of what was then the rigidly segregated South.

Proud history

Benjamin Payton is just the fifth president of what is now Tuskegee University. He says Washington was a great compromiser, which brought him scorn from confrontational black leaders but attracted moral and financial support from powerful whites.

"He did it at a time when racial conflict was at its height, when terrorism was at its height, when blacks were routinely taken as objects of play and murder," Payton says. "Washington took the position that no matter what other people think of you, the question is what you think of yourself and what you're going to do with the talents that have been embodied in you."