The first graduating class of the famed Tuskegee Airmen. (Chicago Tribune)
TUSKEGEE, Ala. -- This is not a glamorous city. Its glory days are long gone, though a handful of once-fine mansions built before the Civil War are evidence that "money" had been here.
The drive 40 miles east of Montgomery, the capital, on U.S. Highway 80, also known as the old Dixie Overland Highway, winds through piney woods, passing an occasional gray-weathered shack tucked back in the trees.
In Tuskegee itself, it's clear that the town is down on its luck, with many houses in need of a face-lift and few stores or businesses open. Years ago racial problems prompted prosperous white-owned businesses to close and nearly all white residents to move away.
But half a century ago, during the civil rights movement, noble history was made here. And decades before that, the town was important because of the Tuskegee Institute, which under the determined leadership of Booker T. Washington offered an education to the children of former slaves, though Washington realized that education alone was not enough. Tuskegee graduates also were well versed in any of many trades to guarantee them a livelihood.
For the school, Washington also had managed to lure George Washington Carver, a man Henry Ford once described as "having the mind of a scientist and the soul of a saint." Carver had given up a far more prestigious position at Iowa State College to come here to teach. And through his research, he was able to change the lives of area farmers.
He wrote that while he "initially wanted to help the poor black farmers of Alabama, eventually he was able to help all farmers, black and white" as they attempted to scratch a living out of destitute soil.
Carver discovered that peanuts could grow in abundance in such soil, actually enriching it, and then he figured out hundreds of ways to use the lowly legume.
Showcasing these efforts and others is a Black History Trail that celebrates Tuskegee's storied past. To follow the trail, I recommend starting at the Tuskegee Heritage Museum, 109 Westside St. (800-462-6006) on the old Town Square.
Here in a historic 3,000-square-foot former store, Charles Kirk, 72, who runs a flower shop next door, has created a world of 19th and early 20th century farm life, mostly with hundreds of artifacts from his own family, which came here in the 1840s.
Kerosene lanterns, cast-iron pots, glass scrub boards, iron-frame beds, iceboxes, cross-cut saws, axes, horse and mule harnesses and more occupy nearly every inch of floor space or hang from the walls and the ceiling. Dozens of early photos show men and women, blacks and whites, plowing with mules; planting corn, velvet beans or cotton; chopping and picking cotton.
The museum also displays numerous Native American artifacts, including bead jewelry, early class photos of students at nearby Tuskegee Institute, and rare silver dollars and stamps featuring Carver and Washington.
Kirk noted that years ago, "everyone here was alike, blacks and whites, all farmers, all barely surviving."
There was no middle class, he continued, "just poor farmers working shoulder to shoulder. A few families owned land, but most sharecropped."
And until about 50 years ago, the town prospered, he said, "with three or four banks, stores, cotton gins, factories that made cottonseed oil." But, he added, racial problems arose under a New Deal "‘resettlement program,' a land-utilization project supposedly intended to help impoverished blacks acquire land, moving them west of town" and away from depleted soil that would become the 1,700-acre Tuskegee National Forest, but leaving whites on their land.
Further fueling strife was an effort to block the black vote. The next stop on the trail tells that story. It was at the Butler Chapel A.M.E. Zion Church, 1002 N. Church St. (334-727-6619), where in the mid-1950s the Rev. Kenneth Buford, responding to a state effort to prevent registered blacks from voting in local elections, began urging parishioners and others in the African-American community to boycott Tuskegee's white-owned businesses, most of which eventually closed, Kirk said.
Thousands gathered at the red brick church in 1957 for the first meeting of Tuskegee's Civic Association's "crusade for citizenship." Redrawn boundaries challenged in court were changed, and by 1964 Macon County, where Tuskegee is located, had a predominantly black electorate, and several blacks had been elected to office, including Buford, who served on the city council.
Today most of Tuskegee's remaining businesses are run by African-Americans, Kirk said. (Tours of the church are available by appointment.)
Other stops on the trail
•Tuskegee Human and Civil Rights Multicultural Center, 104 S. Elm St. (334-724-0800, tuskegeecenter.org ), an interactive history museum established by attorney Fred Gray, among whose clients were the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. and Rosa Parks.