The Tuskegee Normal School for Colored Teachers…

The Tuskegee Normal School for Colored Teachers is part of the expansion of institutions of higher education for blacks in the South following the American Civil War, many founded by the Upper North American Missionary Association.

Founded on July 4, 1881, a teachers school has been the dream of Lewis Adams, a former slave, and George W. Campbell, a former slaveholder, who share a commitment to education of blacks.

Despite lacking formal education, Adams can read, write and speak several languages.

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

Adams and Campbell had secured two thousand dollars from the State of Alabama for teachers' salaries but nothing for land, buildings, or equipment.

Adams, Thomas Dyer, and M. B. Swanson had formed Tuskegee's first board of commissioners.

They had written to the Hampton Institute, a historically black college in Virginia, asking the school for a recommendation for their new school.

Samuel C. Armstrong, the Hampton Principal and a former Union general, had recommended the twenty-five year-old Booker T. Washington, an alumnus and teacher at Hampton.

The young principal had begun classes for his new school in a run-down church and shanty.

The following year in 1882, Washington buys a plantation, and over the years, the new campus buildings will be constructed here, usually by students as part of their work-study.

By the turn of the century, the university will have almost twenty-three hundred acres.

Based on his experience at the Hampton Institute, Washington intends to train students in skills, morals and religious life.

Washington urges the teachers he trains "to return to the plantation districts and show the people there how to put new energy and new ideas into farming as well as into the intellectual and moral and religious life of the people." (Washington, Booker (1995). Up From Slavery. Dover. p. 127.)

Gradually, he will develop a rural extension program, to take progressive ideas and training to those who could not come to the campus.

Tuskegee alumni will found smaller schools and colleges throughout the South, and continue to stress teacher training.