Contact: Thonnia Lee and Crystal Drake, Office of Strategic Communications
Dear Booker T:
On the occasion of your birthday, I write to you with joy in my heart.
On campus, more than 3300 students continue to benefit from your vision today, reflecting and reigniting the shining light your example remains.
Your students continue to graduate, fully prepared to achieve the financial independence you dreamed for them, moving onward and upward to grow and support their families and communities and to lead industry and innovation across this country.
They are working to cure cancer, and training as pilots in the skies just outside your campus. They are thriving with the highest social and economic mobility outcomes of any university in the state of Alabama and all of the 101 Historically Black Colleges and Universities.
They continue to become chief executive officers, college deans and professors, small business owners, and medical professionals.
Yes, sir, your vision is bearing beautiful fruit, alive and well in our Renaissance Era!
We are, indeed, in a Renaissance of your founding principles rooted in an education of the hand, the head, and the heart. Our faculty and staff are working tirelessly to elevate that ideal so that a new generation is well-equipped to meet the modern challenges of today and those that lie ahead.
I remind our students that your entrance exam to Hampton Normal and Agricultural Institute was to clean a room that would be judged by the unforgiving test of a spotless, white handkerchief — and you passed. We expect nothing less from our students today — preparation to do hard things with excellence, the humility to view all work as a dignified expression of good character, and the expectation that no shortcuts will be accepted.
Next month, we look forward to graduating students into the next chapters of their lives as both doers and thinkers, and champions of equitable access for all. We call it “The Tuskegee Way” and we thank you for being our foundational way maker.
We will also welcome many of them right back to Mother Tuskegee to continue their graduate school research and innovation – just as you recruited Robert R. Taylor from MIT and George Washington Carver from Iowa State – because we know that we must sustain and nurture our own in pursuit of scholarship that will change the world.
Sitting here upon the very grounds where you arrived many spring times ago in 1881, I can report that we continue to restore and reimagine this glorious campus to its fullest potential.
As we access new technology to strengthen and rebuild structures worthy of our legacy, we remain careful to honor and preserve buildings that still stand today as a testament to the labor, sweat and grit – and the technical expertise – of brick masons and other students, faculty and staff who built this campus from the ground up.
The Tuskegee legacy is thriving, here in Tuskegee, in the state of Alabama, throughout our nation and across the globe.
Last week, I was humbled to be present when the Alabama State Legislature declared April 5, 2026, Booker T. Washington Day, 170 years after your birth in a fourteen-by-sixteen log cabin on a slave plantation in Virginia. It was an honor to address those gathered, as one of countless beneficiaries of your genius, foresight, vision, and unwavering faith in the power of education.
I was pleased to report to them that 144 years after that same body’s appropriation of 100 acres of land and $2,000 to establish what would become Tuskegee Institute, the return on that investment is unassailably clear.
I also shared that we recognize and are indebted to the reality that Tuskegee is the result of partnership – because people came together, regardless of their advantages or lack thereof, to make this institution a reality. The Legislature used its influence and the Tuskegee community did their part, whether by bringing you a blind horse, or delivering the six eggs they could spare. They all believed with you in Tuskegee, and that shared responsibility between institution and community endures to this day.
Today, Tuskegee University generates an estimated $237.1 million in annual economic impact and supports more than 3,000 jobs, reinforcing its role as a major economic engine for the region and for the state, while leading the nation in producing Black engineers, nurses and veterinarians.
Even more powerful – and the truest reflection of your vision through our Renaissance Era –Tuskegee University continues to do all of that by delivering access to education with purpose, developing skills that create opportunity, and incubating innovation that uplifts our people.
Happy Birthday to you, sir.
We press on.
© 2026 Tuskegee University
