A teachers' school was the dream of Lewis Adams, a former slave, and George W. Campbell, a banker, merchant, and former slaveholder, who shared a commitment to the education of black people.

He was an experienced tinsmith, harness-maker, and shoemaker and was a Prince Hall Freemason, an acknowledged leader of the African-American community in Macon County, Alabama.

Adams, Campbell (replacing Thomas Dryer, who died after his appointment), and M. B. Swanson formed Tuskegee's first board of commissioners.

As the newly hired principal in Tuskegee, Booker T. Washington began classes for his new school in a rundown church and shanty.

[11] Based on his experience at the Hampton Institute, Washington intended to train students in skills, morals, and religious life, in addition to academic subjects.

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.

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.

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.

In the early twentieth century, Du Bois envisioned the rise of "the Talented Tenth" to lead African Americans.

Perceived as a spokesman for black "industrial" education, Washington developed a network of wealthy American philanthropists who donated to the school, such as Andrew Carnegie (funding a library building), Collis P. Huntington, John D. Rockefeller, Henry Huttleston Rogers, George Eastman, and Elizabeth Milbank Anderson.

An early champion of the concept of matching funds, Henry H. Rogers was a major anonymous contributor to Tuskegee and dozens of other black schools for more than fifteen years.

Publication of the article "Industrial Education of the Negro" in a leading magazine designed for African-American readers is one piece of evidence against this claim.

Following small-scale recruitments prior to the 1898–99 school year, the university quickly gained popularity among ambitious Afro-Cubans.

[17] Washington developed a major relationship with Julius Rosenwald, a self-made man who rose to the top of Sears, Roebuck and Company in Chicago, Illinois.

Rosenwald and Washington stimulated the construction and operation of more than 5,000 small community schools and supporting resources for the education of blacks throughout the rural the South into the 1930s.

Attracted by the growth of industrial jobs in the North, including the rapid expansion of the Pennsylvania Railroad, suffering job losses because of the boll weevil and increasing mechanization of agriculture, and fleeing extra-legal violence, hundreds of thousands of rural blacks moved from the South to Northern and Midwestern industrial cities in the Great Migration.

However, in the middle of this progress, from 1932 to 1972, the United States government, through the United States Public Health Service, conducted the USPHS syphilis experiment by which the effects of deliberately untreated syphilis were studied, in Macon County, Alabama, with African-American men, living in remote rural communities near Tuskegee, Alabama.

In 1960 he was awarded, along with the partnership of John A. Welch and Louis Fry, the commission for a new chapel, perhaps the most significant modern building constructed in Alabama.

[27] On November 10, 2024, LaTavion Jashun Johnson, a visiting 18-year-old high school male, was killed and 16 other people were injured in a mass shooting on campus during homecoming weekend by a lone gunman, who was not a Tuskegee student, and traveled from Montgomery, Alabama, later identified as 25-year-old Jaquez Myrick who was in possession of a handgun and a machine gun conversion device which were used in the shooting.

[28] In 1965 Tuskegee University was declared a National Historic Landmark for the significance of its academic programs, its role in higher education for African-Americans, and its status in United States history.

[8] The Kellogg Hotel & Conference Center at the renovated Dorothy Hall (built 1901) was established in 1994 on the campus of Tuskegee University by the W.K.

The following academic programs are accredited by national agencies: Architecture, Business, Education, Engineering, Clinical Laboratory Sciences, Nursing, Occupational Therapy, Social Work, and Veterinary Medicine.

In 2019, Tuskegee signed a partnership with the Ross University School of Medicine to help redress diversity shortages in the medical field.

[42] Tuskegee is ranked 109th among 614 master's universities (which award a significant number of master's degrees but few or no doctoral degrees) in the U.S. according to the Washington Monthly 2020 rankings, which rate schools' contribution to the public good as measured by social mobility, research, and promoting public service.

[43] National Center for Bioethics in Research and Health Care is the nation's first bioethics center devoted to engaging the sciences, humanities, law and religious faiths in the exploration of the core moral issues which underlie research and medical treatment of African Americans and other under-served people.

The official launching of the Center took place two years after President Bill Clinton's apology to the nation, the survivors of the Syphilis Study, Tuskegee University, and Tuskegee/Macon County, Alabama for the U.S. Public Health Service medical experiment (1932–1972), where 399 poor—and mostly illiterate—African American sharecroppers became part of a study on non-treating and natural history of syphilis.

Instead, after going 10–2 the Golden Tigers made their first playoff appearance in school history for the 2013 NCAA Division II Football Championship, for which they had qualified in the past but could not participate due to the Turkey Day Classic.

The baseball program has won thirteen SIAC championships and has produced several professional players, including big-leaguers Leon Wagner, Ken Howell, Alan Mills and Roy Lee Jackson.

Tuskegee won the 2013–14 SIAC Championship and advanced to the 2014 NCAA Division II men's basketball tournament.

Tuskegee won the NCAA Division II South Regional Championship by defeating Delta State University 80–59.