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.
