Tuskegee Institute Advancement League (TIAL)

The Tuskegee Institute Advancement League was founded by Tuskegee Institute students in the 1960s as a SNCC affiliate dedicated to leading the blossoming student movement at Tuskegee. TIAL was led by Tuskegee Institute students, not SNCC leaders, because its founders believed that people who were from and who lived in Tuskegee would know best how to fight for civil rights in that city. Some students were members of TIAL and also worked as SNCC organizers, such as Gwen Patton. In Tuskegee’s civil rights matters, SNCC deferred to TIAL, and supported TIAL’s initiatives, including the March 10, 1965 “March That Wouldn’t Turn Around,” and the resulting sit-in at the Alabama State Capitol. 

TIAL’s activities included organizing the Tuskegee to Montgomery contingent of the Selma to Montgomery March on March 21, 1965, other sit-ins at the Capitol, wade-ins attempting to integrate Tuskegee’s public pools, voter registration in Macon County and citizenship schools to teach rural people how to pass the voting tests designed to keep them from voting and attempts to integrate the white Methodist Church in Tuskegee. TIAL also led protest marches after the murder of one-time TIAL member and young civil rights activist Sammy Younge, Jr. by a white gas station attendant in Tuskegee. 

TIAL embodied a new generation of civil rights activists in Tuskegee. They embraced direct confrontation, Black Power, and increasing Black political representation and power. They favored “desegregation” over “integration.” The younger generation expressed frustration with the tried-and-true, albeit slow and meticulous, methods of the older generation of activists at the Tuskegee Civic Association. They viewed gradualism as accommodationist and as not enough anymore. They had come of age in a time of relatively quick societal change and integration compared to their elders, and they expected a faster rate of change.  

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