Tuskegee Civic Association

Tuskegee Civic Association, African American group dedicated to civil rights, voter education, and community welfare in Alabama. Formed in 1941, the Tuskegee Civic Association grew out of a group of men who had been meeting since 1910 as The Men's Meeting and, later, The Tuskegee Men's Club. Its members worked on several fronts to improve the lives of African Americans in Tuskegee, Alabama, and its surrounding area, Macon County.

Under its first president, Charles G. Gomillion, a sociology professor at Tuskegee Institute, the association published a voters' handbook and held a "school for voters" on the Tuskegee campus to educate local African Americans. With help from the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), the association approached the U.S. Department of Justice for help in enforcing blacks' legal rights, which were denied by local voter registration boards. Their efforts met with success, as the number of black registered voters in Macon County swelled from under 100 in 1941 to more than 7,000 in 1967.

The association also fought for school desegregation. In 1962 it initiated a lawsuit, Lee v. Macon County, that demanded the integration of the local school system, which had stubbornly resisted implementing the U.S. Supreme Court's call for desegregation as put forth in Brown v. Board of Education (1954). Despite violent white resistance, which included cross burnings and a Ku Klux Klan rally, a federal district court sided with the Tuskegeeans in 1966.

Perhaps the organization's most important achievement was defeating a 1957 statutory redrawing of Tuskegee's city limits — a classic case of gerrymandering that effectively disenfranchised the area's growing black vote. In Gomillion v. Lightfoot, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that such redistricting had violated the 15th Amendment rights of Tuskegee's African Americans.

Following a period of deactivation in the 1970s, the Tuskegee Civic Association re-formed in the 1980s, led by its first woman president, Claudine Penson. Currently presided over by the Rev. L. M. Randolph, the organization continues its efforts in voter registration and education, school reform, and community relations.