Generations Clash

By the 1960s, the Tuskegee Civic Association’s (TCA) years of steadfast work in civic education, voter registration, and legal action for civil rights were bearing fruit. Tuskegee had been restored to its former legal boundaries, and by 1964 rising numbers of Black voters were poised to finally elect Black candidates to city office.

The careful, meticulous, and gradualist TCA found itself at odds with younger activists who saw their methods as accommodationist, outdated, too slow, and too concerned with the comfort of white segregationists. These new civil rights leaders sought change through direct action and confrontation. The TCA was concerned that rash actions from young civil rights leaders would jeopardize all they had spent the last decades trying to build. The new generation perceived the TCA leaders as elitists who shunned those outside of Tuskegee’s educated middle class and who did not empathize with the plight of rural people.

Gwen Patton

Jessie Parkhurst Guzman

Gwen Patton (b. 1943) exemplified the new generation of civil rights leaders in Tuskegee and throughout the nation who were coming into their own in the 1960s. She was an important leader in the Tuskegee student movement, the Tuskegee Institute Advancement League (TIAL), Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), the Black Power movement, and the anti-war movement.

Image: Gwen Patton and other students from Tuskegee Institute during a demonstration to protest the murder of Samuel L. Younge, Jr., a civil rights worker. 1966 January. (Alabama Department of Archives and History)

Jessie Parkhurst Guzman

Jessie Parkhurst Guzman (b. 1898) held several prominent positions at Tuskegee Institute over the course of her career including Director of Records and Research and Dean of Women. She advocated for equal citizenship through her professional research, writing, and publications, and through her decades of work with the Tuskegee Civic Association.

Image: Jessie Parkhurst Guzman speaks at a podium, c. 1970. (Tuskegee University Archives)

Generations Clash

Gwen Patton

Jessie Parkhurst Guzman

Jessie Parkhurst Guzman

Jessie Parkhurst Guzman

Jessie Parkhurst Guzman

Jessie Parkhurst Guzman

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