Educator and community activist Charles Gomillion worked at the
Tuskegee Institute for more than forty years. As president of
the Tuskegee Civic Association, he worked with Martin Luther
King, Jr., and the Southern Christian Leadership Conference to
increase African American voter registration in the South.
Gomillion was the lead plaintiff in the landmark 1960 civil
rights case Gomillion v. Lightfoot, which led the U.S. Supreme
Court to declare gerrymandering unconstitutional. Gomillion was
born in Johnston, South Carolina, in 1900. Although his parents
encouraged his education, Johnston’s African American school
only ran three months out of the year. Gomillion left home at 16
to attend secondary school at Paine College, a Methodist school
in Augusta, Georgia, where he completed high school and some
college before dropping out to help his aging parents. After
working as a junior high school principal, he returned to Paine
to finish college and began teaching at Tuskegee Institute in
1928. Gomillion continued