Macon County Leaders

By the late nineteenth century, Macon County was an important center of African American education. Booker T. Washington established the Tuskegee Normal School in 1881 to train African American teachers. Later known as the Tuskegee Institute and then Tuskegee University, the school employed one of America's most innovative researchers in the field of agriculture, George Washington Carver, as well as a number of other pioneering African American researchers and educators. During World War II, Macon County was the site of the Army Air Force's segregated flight training program, which gave African American men their first opportunity to serve as military aviators. Known today as the Tuskegee Airmen, almost 1,000 men earned their wings at Tuskegee Army Air Field. Tuskegee AirmenTuskegee also served as an important site of rallies and protests during the civil rights movement of the 1960s. Macon County and Tuskegee were the headquarters for one of the most notorious events in American history, the Tuskegee Syphilis Study. From 1932 to 1972, the U.S. Public Health Service, Tuskegee Institute, and state, county, and city health agencies misled African American males infected with syphilis into a treatment program, while in fact withholding treatment, to study the effects of long-term syphilis infection on the human body.