le there I was
reelected principal of the Swayne School, and a notice of the election
reached me one morning. Three hours later I received a letter from the
secretary of the University of Arkansas (white) informing me that my
name had been presented to the board of trustees of that institution,
and I had been elected to the presidency of the State Branch Normal
College at Pine Bluff, Ark. I was not a candidate for the position, but
seeing in it an opportunity for greater usefulness, I accepted the
position in my twenty-fifth year, and have just been reelected to serve
a third term as president of the school. The Branch Normal College was
established in 1875 as one of the Land Grant colleges, and has a
property valuation of $100,000.

Over my desk hangs a picture of the Principal of Tuskegee; and in my
desk are views of the institution which he has built. But these may be
removed. In the book of my memory and in the secret chambers of my heart
I have enshrined the two names which, with God and the parents now on
the other side of the Great Divide, have shaped and given direction to
my whole life--Tuskegee and Booker T. Washington.

II

A SCHOOL PRINCIPAL'S STORY

BY WILLIAM H. HOLTZCLAW

I was born in Randolph County, Ala., near the little town of Roanoke.
The house in which I first saw the light--or that part of it which
streamed through the cracks, for there were no windows--was a little log
cabin 12 by 16 feet. I know very little of my ancestry, except that my
mother was the daughter of her mother's master, born in the days of
slavery, and up to 1864 herself the slave of her half-brother. She was
born in the State of Georgia. My father was born in Elmore County, Ala.
He never knew his father, but remembered his mother and eleven brothers.
My mother was married twice before she married my father. She married
first at the age of fifteen. I am the fifth of fifteen children, and my
father's oldest child. Neither my father nor my mother could read or
write; mother could get a little out of some pages of the Bible by
spelling each word as she came to it.

My early years were spent on a farm. When only four years old I was put
to such work as I could do--such as riding a deaf and blind mule, while
my brother plowed him in order to make him go forward, for he cared
nothing for assault from the rear. We worked for a white man for
one-fourth of the crop. He furnished the stock, land, and seeds, and we
did the wo