From Azaleas to Zydeco: My 4,600-Mile Journey through the South

Forty Miles to Tuskegee

Forty Miles to Tuskegee It’s only forty miles from Montgomery to Tuskegee, but the cultural distance is much greater—from the first capital of the Confederacy to a town nationally known as a center of African-American achievement. Tuskegee is home to Tuskegee University, perhaps the most influential private, historically black university in the country. Founded in 1881, the Tuskegee Institute’s first president was Booker T. Washington. Dr. Washington believed that if newly freed slaves were provided with skills, they would become self-sufficient in the rural South. Being self-sufficient would lead to their becoming productive members of their communities and to their acceptance by white Americans. Dr. Washington’s theory of education became the Institute’s mission. Later, Tuskegee became famous for the Tuskegee Airmen, the 994 World War II airmen who trained at Tuskegee Army Air Field and saw action overseas. Their service was an experiment of the Army Air Forces. They showed that given equal opportunity and training, African Americans could fly, command, and support combat units as well as white units could. The Tuskegee Airmen overcame segregation and prejudice to become one of the most highly respected fighting groups of World War II. They proved conclusively that African Americans could operate and maintain sophisticated combat aircraft. The Tuskegee Airmen’s achievements paved the way for full integration of the U.S. military. 325 Tuskegee has also become known as the location of the National Center for Bioethics in Research and Health Care. The center located there because of a scandal involving the Tuskegee Study of Untreated Syphilis in the Negro Male, a government study conducted between 1932 and 1972. The Tuskegee Study recruited 399 poor, mostly illiterate syphilitics for research related to the natural progression of the untreated disease. The forty-year study became a scandal when researchers failed to treat patients appropriately when penicillin became known as an effective cure for the disease. Study participants were left untreated so that effects of the disease could be studied further. These ethical lapses brought about major changes in U.S. laws and regulations to protect participants in clinical research studies. Today, Tuskegee is a small town of about 12,000 people and the county seat of Macon County. It is over ninety-five percent African American. The county itself is eighty percent African American, the Downtown Tuskegee 326 highest percentage of any county in Alabama. Strangely, I thought of Copperhill, Tennessee, while walking around Tuskegee’s town square. The towns are not similar at all. In Copperhill, a river and a state line divide the downtown; it has no town square like Tuskegee. Copperhill is also hilly, not flat like Tuskegee. Copperhill is completely, or at least overwhelmingly , white. In Tuskegee, I did not see one white face. Yet, without exception, people around the Tuskegee town square acknowledged me with a smile and a nod. A starkly different response from the stares I had received in Copperhill. I drove a few blocks from the town square to the old post office, now the home of the Tuskegee Repertory Theatre, where I met Dyann Robinson, the artistic force behind the theatre. Dyann is a Tuskegee native who is a proud graduate of St. Joseph Catholic School and Tuskegee Institute High School. She began dancing lessons from her second-grade teacher, a nun. Some years later she made her stage debut in Tuskegee as a member of Jessie Gibson’s Gibsonian Dance Troupe, which toured African-American schools and colleges in Alabama and Georgia. Dyann left Alabama in 1960 to study dance at Butler University in Indianapolis, Indiana. She embarked on a career as a professional dancer, first in New York, then traveling the United States and Europe. Even though she always considered herself a ballet dancer, she became a member of the original cast in the Broadway hit musical Bubbling Brown Sugar. So why is a world-class dancer living in Tuskegee? She came back to be with family. What does a world-class dancer do in Tuskegee? Dance. But to dance, Dyann had to start her own dance company. She developed the Repertory Theatre while she worked day jobs for the City of Tuskegee’s Department of Cultural Affairs and later as a faculty member of Auburn University’s Department of Theatre. Now she’s mainly a dance teacher. As a teacher, she imparts life lessons to her students. One of her...