Tuskegee University, in the words of the poet, Paul Laurence Dunbar, “is the Pride of the Swift Growing South.” This representation has been tarnished of late with several missteps following the 2010 retirement of Andrew Felton Brimmer, its long time Chairman of the Board of Trustees.
Brimmer, an economist and the first African American to serve as a governor on the Federal Reserve Board, ended forty years of service on the Tuskegee Board at the same time that the university’s fifth president, Benjamin Payton was retiring.