Tuskegee is a city in Macon County, Alabama. General Thomas Simpson Woodward, a Creek War veteran below Andrew Jackson, laid out the city and founded it in 1833. It became the county chair in the similar year and it was incorporated in 1843. It is the largest city in Macon County. At the 2020 census the population was 9,395, down from 9,865 in 2010 and 11,846 in 2000.

Tuskegee has been important in African-American history and extremely influential in United States history since the 19th century. Before the American Civil War the area was developed for cotton plantations, dependent on enslaved African-American people.

After the fighting many freedmen continued to work upon plantations in the rural area, which was devoted to agriculture, primarily cotton as a commodity crop. In 1881 the Tuskegee Normal School (now Tuskegee University, a historically black college) was founded by Lewis Adams, a former slave whose father, Jesse Adams, a white slave owner had allowed him to be educated. Its first founding principal was Booker T. Washington, who developed a national reputation and humane network to preserve education of freedmen and their children.

In 1923, the Tuskegee Veterans Administration Medical Center was established, initially for the estimated 300,000 African-American veterans of World War I in the South, when public facilities were racially segregated. Twenty-seven buildings were constructed on the 464-acre campus.