Looking Back Nearly 60 Years: The Tuskegee Institute Community Action Corps (TICAC)

INTRODUCTION

Starting in the fall of 1963 and lasting through spring 1968, Tuskegee Institute, one of the country’s most prestigious Historically Black Colleges and Universities, hosted three unique college student outreach programs. I created these programs, but they could not have been sustained without the encouragement and full support of President Luther H. Foster. This is the story of those programs and those college students, the story of their courage, service, and leadership during one of the most tumultuous periods in American history. The story is embodied in the Tuskegee Institute Community Action Corps (TICAC), the Tuskegee Institute Summer Education Program (TISEP), and the Tuskegee Institute Community Education Program (TICEP). These programs together make up what I refer to as the 3Ts. Featured prominently in this story are the Tuskegee Institute students, who volunteered via TICAC to tutor elementary and high school students in Macon county, Alabama. These young college students were joined in the summer of 1965 by an additional group of schoolmates as well as a large contingent of students from 30 other institutions of higher learning across the country, including the overwhelmingly White St. Olaf College in Northfield, Minnesota.

PREVIOUS LITERATURE

Much has been written about the city of Tuskegee and/or Tuskegee Institute over the years, but much of it revolves around the founding of the famed Tuskegee Airman flying unit of the US Army Air Corps and the Tuskegee Syphilis Study. Few studies examine the city and/or its politics. Tuskegee by Amalia K. Amaki and Amelia Boynton Robinson (2013) and Robert J. Norrell’s Reaping the Whirlwhind: The Civil Rights Movement in Tuskegee (1985) are two of the books among this small body of literature that offers readers an up close and personal look at Tuskegee’s politics and Blacks, struggle for racial equality. And while Tuskegee Institute is the city’s most widely known entity, few scholars have bothered to study the ways in which it attempted to bride the schism between town and gown, a divide that exists in many small towns that are home to colleges and universities. Also, few can deny Tuskegee Institute’s role in the education of its students, but not many scholars can talk expertly about the manner in which its students touched the lives of the county’s resident. This research note seeks to fill that void.

MAKING A DIFFERENCE WHEN IT WAS NEEDED MOST

This story is part of a larger project that I hope to finish in due course. In the meantime, this story is recounted in the hopes that readers will feel the courage, passion, and humanity of a cadre of young college students who committed themselves to making a difference at a time when their help was needed most. Over the course of five years, more than 1,800 college students participated in TICAC, TISEP, and TICEP, tutoring over 30,000 elementary and high school students. Equally as impressive were the more than 8,000 adults who participated in the 65 educational program centers that were established in the 13 Black-Belt counties. These 13 Black-Belt counties were the focal point of the 3Ts programs.¹ The college students who participated in the 3Ts programs were varied in their socioeconomic makeup and yet they were united in their endeavor to uplift the residents with whom they worked.

TUSKEGEE COMMUNITY ACTION CORPS AND MACON COUNTY

The goal of the Tuskegee Institute Community Action Corps was to aid, empower, and revitalize Black communities in Macon County. The program’s motto was “We Want to Help;” it’s insignia, an image of a male student with a hoe and a female student with books. TICAC volunteers tutored elementary, junior high, and high school students in their homes. Tutors also worked unofficially as teacher aides in a few of Macon County’s “Negro” public schools. Interestingly, the adults in the homes where young people were being tutored often requested tutoring lessons for themselves. Sometimes, they would invite a neighbor to join in the tutoring session. The 3Ts adult learning centers emerged from...