Tuskegee Institute

Tuskegee Institute, now Tuskegee University, was founded on July 4, 1881 as a school for freed slaves in the area of Macon County, Alabama. Booker T. Washington, the famed educator, author, orator and political leader, was the first teacher and principal of the school, where he served until his death in 1915. Since that time, Tuskegee has risen to national prominence as an historically black institution that provides both an exemplary liberal arts education as well as a curriculum that emphasizes “the relationship between education and work force preparation in the sciences, professions and technical areas. It is also celebrated for initiating the Tuskegee Airmen flight training program, the all-Black squadrons of Tuskegee Airmen who were highly decorated World War II combat veterans. Carnegie Corporation made its first grant to Tuskegee in 1921, but prior to that, the Corporation’s founder, Andrew Carnegie, had made significant bequests to the Institute. Altogether, the school received around $1.3 million from Andrew Carnegie and his Corporation from 1900, when Andrew Carnegie made his first gift of $20,000 to an endowment for a library building for the school, all the way through to 1963, when the Corporation made a grant to strengthen Tuskegee’s academic program through a $1.5 million allocation to the United Negro College Fund.