page_title: Tuskegee University
section_title: Booker T. Washington's leadership
hierarchical_section_title: Tuskegee University / History / Booker T. Washington's leadership
caption_attribution_description: English: WASHINGTON, BOOKER T. Digitally retouched.
context_page_description: Tuskegee University is a private, historically black university in Tuskegee, Alabama. The campus is designated as the Tuskegee Institute National Historic Site by the National Park Service. The university was home to scientist George Washington Carver and to World War II's Tuskegee Airmen.
  Tuskegee University offers 40 bachelor's degree programs, 17 master's degree programs, a five-year accredited professional degree program in architecture, 4 doctoral degree programs, and the Doctor of Veterinary Medicine. The university is home to nearly 3,000 students from around the U.S. and 30 foreign countries.
  The university's campus was designed by architect Robert Robinson Taylor, the first African American to graduate from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, in conjunction with David Williston, the first professionally trained African-American landscape architect.
context_section_description: As a young free man after the Civil War, Washington sought a formal education. He worked his way through Hampton Normal and Agricultural Institute (now Hampton University) and attended college at Wayland Seminary in Washington, DC (now Virginia Union University).  He returned to Hampton as a teacher.
  Hired as principal of the new normal school (for the training of teachers) in Tuskegee, Alabama, Booker T. Washington opened his school on July 4, 1881, on the grounds of the Butler Chapel African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church. The following year, he bought the grounds of a former plantation, out of which he expanded the institute in the decades that followed.
  The school expressed Washington's dedication to the pursuit of self-reliance. In addition to training teachers, he also taught the practical skills needed for his students to succeed at farming or other trades typical of the rural South, where most of them came from. He wanted his students to see labor as practical, but also as beautiful and dignified.  As part of their work-study programs, students constructed most of the new buildings. Many students earned all or part of their expenses through the construction, agricultural, and domestic work associated with the campus, as they reared livestock and raised crops, as well as producing other goods.
  The continuing expansion of black education took place against a background of increased violence against blacks in the South, after Democrats regained power in state governments and imposed white supremacy in society.  They instituted legal racial segregation and a variety of Jim Crow laws, after disfranchising most blacks by constitutional amendments and electoral rules from 1890 until 1964. Against this background, Washington's vision, as expressed in his "Atlanta compromise" speech, became controversial and was challenged by new leaders, such as W.E.B. Du Bois, who argued that blacks should have opportunities for study in classical academic programs, as well as vocational institutes. In the early twentieth century, Du Bois envisioned the rise of "the Talented Tenth" to lead African Americans.
  Washington gradually attracted notable scholars to Tuskegee, including the botanist George Washington Carver, one of the university's most renowned professors.
caption: Booker T. Washington
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