Diasporic Tuskegee

Few institutions hold as much symbolic power in the post-emancipation United States than Tuskegee. Booker T. Washington and Tuskegee institute represented one major center of African American thought and response to the disintegration of black rights and imposition of Jim Crow. The story of Tuskegee is often an American story.
Frank Andre Guridy, however, situates Tuskegee within a broader diasporic context. The institute was far more than a fixture in the Jim Crow South or the national consciousness of the United States but was an important and contested symbol in within the African diaspora. Guridy uses Cuban students at Tuskegee to examine both the school and its founder as diasporic subjects. This move brings Tuskegee out of the scholarly morass of historical debates over accomodationism vs integrationism (vs perhaps radicalism). Tuskegee was criticized by many African Americans and people of the African diaspora, including students of the institution, but the school was more than the sum of the debates. Despite criticism, students continued to come to Tuskegee to seek their own purposes, outcomes were more than the structure of the school might indicate.
Guridy's move is useful for broadening the scope of inquiry into black agency and transnational diasporic identities. Tuskegee meant many things to many people. The school's model appealed to both Afro-Cuban intellectuals, Pan-Africanists, and British colonizers, and American segregationists. By decentering Jim Crow and the United States from the discussion of Tuskegee to examine its transnational and diasporic meaning the institution's meaning becomes more contingent and contested. The process of diasporic imagining is a useful lens for broadening and deepening the history of institutions, people, and events that we thought we knew and had slotted into our national narratives.