COMMANDANT OF CADETS AT HAMPTON
INSTITUTE; PRINCIPAL OF TUSKEGEE
INSTITUTE

Plantation Childhood.

Robert Russa Moton was a leading black American educator in the 1910s who graduated from Virginia's Hampton Institute in 1890, then served as the school's commandant of cadets from 1891 to 1915. He succeeded Booker T. Washington as principal of the Tuskegee Institute in Alabama, a vocational school for blacks, where he raised the curriculum to college level. Moton grew up on a plantation called Pleasant Shade in Prince Edward County, Virginia, where his father, a former slave, had hired himself out to a wealthy white family, the William Vaughans. Moton, with many responsibilities in the Vaughan house, wrote that it was in that home that he "caught my first glimpses of real culture and got my first inspiration as to what I would like to be." Moton was educated by Mrs. Vaughan and also in a free school, one of the first in...