Macon County, Alabama, was a center of black intellectual life. Home of the Tuskegee Institute and a Veterans Administration hospital, its population in the 1960s was 84 percent black, many of whom were educated and middle class. The Tuskegee Civic Association had been pushing and pulling blacks onto the voter registration rolls since 1941, despite state laws which made registration very difficult, with success often subject to the whims and preferences of the local Board of Registrars.

Read and see related photographs at the link below.