Peanut butter and some of the most courageous fighter pilots of World War II share common roots. So do author Ralph Ellison and the first African-American four-star general.
All are products of the only college or university designated a national historic site by Congress: Tuskegee University, originally founded as a school for teachers of color, in Tuskegee, Ala.
Today, much of it is operated for visitors as the Tuskegee Institute National Historic Site.
Layer upon layer of African-American history can be found here.
Booker T. Washington, raised a slave on a Virginia tobacco plantation, founded the college on July, 4, 1881, and served as its first chief administrator. In the more than 12 decades since, there have only been four others.
In 1896, Washington lured one of the world's foremost scientists, George Washington Carver, to the school promising not much money but many opportunities for self-fulfillment. Carver planned to work at Tuskegee for only a few years, but he stayed 47 -- until his death in 1943.
By the time of Carver's death, the Tuskegee Airmen were already being trained at nearby Moton Field. Despite a prevailing thought among whites that African-Americans were not intelligent enough to succeed at military aviation, nearly 1,000 black aviators, about a quarter of them Tuskegee Institute students, served the United States with honor, albeit in a segregated unit.
Tuskegee is today the No. 1 producer of African-American aerospace engineers in the United States. More than three-quarters of the world's black veterinarians are Tuskegee grads.
Ellison, the first black person to win the National Book Award, for his classic Invisible Man, attended school here, as did Daniel "Chappie" James, the first African-American four-star general.
At the center of the campus is the Booker T. Washington Monument, dedicated in 1922. Called "Lifting the Veil," it shows a dignified Washington lifting "the veil of ignorance from his people and [pointing] the way to progress through education and industry," as the inscription notes.
The historic site also includes Washington's 15-room Queen Anne-style red-brick home, The Oaks, which dates to 1899. Its design is typically heavy Victorian inside with one exception -- the light and airy European landscape friezes painted high on the walls of the parlor and library on the first floor. Washington intended them as inspirations for students to think beyond their worlds.
The Oaks, used by Washington as sort of a quasi-public building for official receptions as well as his private home, was constructed as a large student project.
The three main rooms downstairs are furnished with period pieces based on early photographs. Except for Washington's personal study, the second-floor rooms are empty because no photographs exist to show how they were furnished.
Washington died of what is believed to be complications associated with diabetes and hypertension in his bedroom Nov. 14, 1915.
Washington's life is further explored in the showplace named in honor of his colleague, the George Washington Carver Museum.
Built in 1915 as Tuskegee Institute's new laundry building, it was converted to a museum two years before the scientist's death in 1943. Pick up a telephone receiver here to listen to Washington speak a portion of his famous Atlanta Address, delivered Sept. 18, 1895, at the Atlantic Cotton States and International Exposition.
The oration, saved for posterity by his son Ernest Davidson Washington, noted, "In all things that are purely social, we [the races] can be as separate as the fingers yet as one hand in all things essential to human progress."
Washington's Agricultural School on Wheels, once a horse-drawn wagon, is on display in the museum.
The School on Wheels was the cornerstone of Tuskegee's extension services for the rural people of Alabama. Instructors would travel from farm to farm to teach Carver's latest agricultural techniques and preach Tuskegee's doctrines of self-sufficiency and self-reliance.
Carver may be best known for advocating the planting of peanuts in the South to replenish soil decimated by too many years of growing cotton.
Some of his 300 peanut products include foods like the obvious (peanut butter) and the not so obvious (peanut mayonnaise and peanut chocolate fudge).
Another part of his legacy is the George Washington Carver Foundation established after his death at Tuskegee. The ever-frugal Carver left his entire life's savings for the Carver Museum and the foundation that supports the scientific research of African-Americans.
Both Washington and Carver are buried on the campus grounds, a short distance from the Booker T. Washington Monument.
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