times leading his class in
Greek. He was graduated from the university with honors in
classics, June, 1886.

He was then elected principal of the Wilberforce Collegiate
Institute at Chatham, Ont., where he served one year,
increasing the attendance, and greatly improving the work of
the school. The following year, 1887, he returned to his
native home and visited his parents from whom he had been
separated nine years. The next year after his return to
Canada he was invited by Bishop W. J. Gaines to come to
Georgia and assume the principalship of Morris Brown College
in Atlanta. After much hesitancy, Mr. Richardson accepted
the invitation and took charge of Morris Brown College when
it was a school of small proportions and modest pretensions.
Here Professor Richardson served ten successive years, each
year adding something to the fame and increasing popularity
of the school.

In 1898 he was offered the Presidency of Edward Waters
College in Jacksonville, Fla., by Bishop W. J. Gaines, who
felt that the educational work in Florida then needed just
such a person as Professor Richardson had proven himself to
be in Georgia. Resigning his position in Atlanta he came to
Florida and at once set to work to restore Edward Waters
College to the confidence of the people. In a year's time
the school was again assuming the flourishing condition that
it once had.

The great fire of Jacksonville, May 3, 1901, caused him to
lose all his possessions in the destruction of the college
buildings, nevertheless he has held on unflinchingly to the
work and at great sacrifice and loss has kept the school
together, and is now serving his fourth year at the head of
this institution.

An examination into the earliest records of history will reveal a fact
that is not observant to the casual reader--that man, as an
individual, has ever been groping in darkness, seeking hither and
thither to find a ray of light that would safely guide him and lead
him through the mystic vale of doubt and uncertainty--be a "light to
his pathway, a lantern to his feet."

To this end he has lent all his energies and directed all his forces.
Long and tedious have been the ways and the journeys, yet onward and
upward has he continued to travel, through storm and tempest, amid
trials and vexations, until finally,