Biography
Robert Russa Moton was born in Amelia County, Virginia on August 26, 1867. He graduated from the Hampton Institute in 1890. He married Elizabeth Hunt Harris in 1905, but she died in 1906. He then married his second wife, Jennie Dee Booth in 1908. He had three daughters, Charlotte Moton Hubbard, a State Department aide; Catherine Moton Patterson; and Jennie Moton Taylor.
In 1891, he was appointed commandant of the male student cadet corps at Hampton Institute. In 1915, after the death of Dr. Booker T. Washington, he succeeded Washington as the principal of the Tuskegee Institute, a position he held until retirement in 1935. He also wrote a number of books. He attended the First Pan African Congress in Paris in 1919.
Moton was a member of the Gamma Sigma graduate chapter of Phi Beta Sigma Fraternity, Inc., along with George Washington Carver.
Robert R. Moton died in Capahosic, in Gloucester County, Virginia in 1940 at age 73.
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Famous quotes containing the word biography:
“A great biography should, like the close of a great drama, leave behind it a feeling of serenity. We collect into a small bunch the flowers, the few flowers, which brought sweetness into a life, and present it as an offering to an accomplished destiny. It is the dying refrain of a completed song, the final verse of a finished poem.”
—André Maurois (1885–1967)
“Had Dr. Johnson written his own life, in conformity with the opinion which he has given, that every man’s life may be best written by himself; had he employed in the preservation of his own history, that clearness of narration and elegance of language in which he has embalmed so many eminent persons, the world would probably have had the most perfect example of biography that was ever exhibited.”
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