[Update: after a few months of complaining to the National Park Service website, I now see that there are alerts explaining that the Carver museum is open by appointment and that the Oaks (above) is being rehabilitated. I’m leaving my rant, since that was my experience.].

Once was bad enough. Twice in a row is suspicious. Like the airmen site, the NPS app says the visitor center and Carver museum is open, but it’s not. Only by calling the contact number was I able to find out that it’s closed indefinitely due to Covid. No brochures, no map of the grounds or Carver’s nutrition tour, no sign of explanation, and no restrooms.

Other sites in Alabama are open. Horseshoe Bend nearby had several rangers in modern offices working on computers inside a huge well-landscaped and maintained park with a huge screen showing a 17 minute movie open seven days a week.

But Tuskegee gets nothing. The surrounding town desperately needs jobs, but nope, the park service apparently prioritizes its military sites over its educational and African American sites. That’s not how I expect my tax dollars to be used.

When Booker T. Washington hired people like George Washington Carver to teach and help improve the lives of African Americans, I’m sure he could not have imagined that his university would have been used by the US government to run a 40 year ”experiment” on black men, neither treating nor disclosing their diagnosis of syphilis. (See ”Miss Evers’ Boys” also set in Tuskegee & starring Laurence Fishburne). I’m sure he would have been shocked also to see the economic condition of the town outside the walls of his university. And I think he would have been upset to learn that his house (above), built with help from students and faculty, would be neglected while other similar facilities are fully funded.