Dr. Charles G. Gomillion
|
Educator and community activist, Dr. Charles G. Gomillion worked at the Tuskegee Institute for more than forty years. As president of the Tuskegee Civic Association, he worked with Martin Luther King, Jr., and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference to increase African American voter registration in the South. Gomillion was the lead plaintiff in the landmark 1960 civil rights case Gomillion v. Lightfoot, which led the U.S. Supreme Court to declare gerrymandering unconstitutional.
Gomillion was born in Johnston, South Carolina, in 1900. Although his parents encouraged his education, Johnston’s African American school only ran three months out of the year. Gomillion left home at 16 to attend secondary school at Paine College, a Methodist school in Augusta, Georgia, where he completed high school and some college before dropping out to help his aging parents. After working as a junior high school principal, he returned to Paine to finish college and began teaching at Tuskegee Institute in 1928. Gomillion continued his own studies in sociology, eventually earning a PhD from Ohio State University when he was 59 years old. |
|
This page was created by Khia Walker.
