General Thomas Simpson Woodward, a Creek War veteran under Andrew Jackson, laid out the city and founded it in 1833.

[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.

Its first founding principal was Booker T. Washington, who developed a national reputation and philanthropic network to support education of freedmen and their children.

[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.

[12] The Native American town of Tasquique was located on the Chattahoochee River just south of present-day Columbus, Georgia.

The planters brought or purchased enslaved African Americans to clear woods and develop cotton plantations.

In 1881, the young Booker T. Washington was hired to develop the Tuskegee Normal School for Colored Teachers on the grounds of a former plantation.

[15] Washington led the school for decades, building a wide national network of white industrialist donors among some of the major philanthropists of the era, including George Eastman.

At the same time, Washington secretly provided funding for its legal defense of some highly visible civil rights cases,[which?]

including supporting challenges to Southern states' discriminatory constitutions and practices that disenfranchised African Americans.

Beginning in 1932, the school was the site of the now-infamous Tuskegee Syphilis Study (1932–1972), started to test treatments of the disease.

600 African-American men became involved, being offered free medical care by the U.S. government for their participation, while being unwittingly tested for syphilis.

[17] One of the most famous teachers at Tuskegee was George Washington Carver, whose name is synonymous with innovative research into Southern farming methods and the development of hundreds of commercial products derived from regional crops, including peanuts and sweet potatoes.

A total of 27 buildings were constructed on the 464-acre campus, which provided housing and a hospital to serve the needs of more than 300,000 African-American veterans in the South from World War I.

Though the existing support for the TCA was not often vocalized, many black community members wanted to challenge the political system that was present in Macon County.

The group shed a light on the disparities in the numbers of black people applying for voter registration and those who were successful, even going as far as talking to the United States Commission on Civil Rights.

)[19] Following passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1957, activists made progress in registering black voters in the city.

[11] The law was intended to guarantee that minority whites could retain control of the city even if more blacks succeeded in the arduous process of registering to vote.

Some 3,000 African-American residents protested passage of the law at a church in Tuskegee; they also began an economic boycott of white businesses in the city.

[21] They referred to the boycott as a "selective buying campaign" due to the fact that boycotting was illegal under state law.

[20] African Americans also organized a legal challenge to the law, supported by the NAACP, in a case known as Gomillion v. Lightfoot.

This case was cited in the later Baker v. Carr (1964), in which the Supreme Court ruled that Tennessee's malapportionment of election districts violated civil rights.

(Hardboy) Pruitt, at first opposed the admission of Black students, but worked with other community leaders to comply with the final order of the federal district court, with plans to admit 13 Black students in September 1963 to what had been an all-white high school.

George Wallace opposed compliance with the federal order anywhere in the state on the grounds that it would lead to violence.

Behind the scenes, Wallace enlisted the aid of Ku Klux Klan members and neo-Nazis of the National States' Rights Party to gin up protests calling for the closing of schools that were scheduled to integrate.

[24] Johnny Ford was elected the first black mayor of the city in 1972, and served six consecutive terms in office.

Each member of the city council is elected for a four-year term from one of three geographic single-member districts.

Tuskegee has one city council member who is elected at-large to a four-year term and serves as mayor-pro tem.

The city and other officials were sued under Gomillion v. Lightfoot (1960); the US Supreme Court ruled against the state's action.