Private university in Tuskegee, Alabama, U.S. Booker T. Washington founded the school in 1881 as a teachers' college for blacks, and it still has a predominantly African American student body.
George Washington Carver conducted most of his research (18961943) at Tuskegee, and Frederick D. Patterson, founder of the United Negro College Fund (1944), served as the school's president (193553). The infamous Tuskegee syphilis study, a U.S. Public Health Service project examining the course of untreated syphilis in black men, was based there from the 1930s. Today the university comprises schools of arts and sciences, agriculture, business, education, engineering and architecture, nursing, and veterinary medicine.