Dr. Robert Russa Moton, The Second President Of Tuskegee University Was A Member Of Phi Beta Sigma

Did you know that Dr. Robert Russa Moton, the second president of Tuskegee University, was a member of Phi Beta Sigma Fraternity, Inc.? Moton belonged to the Gamma Sigma chapter at Tuskegee, the same chapter that counted pioneering scientist George Washington Carver among its members.

Robert Russa Moton was born on August 26, 1867, in Amelia County, Virginia, and grew up in nearby Rice and Prince Edward County. He graduated from Hampton Institute in 1890, and the following year he was appointed commandant of the school’s male cadet corps, a role that earned him the nickname “the Major.” He spent more than two decades at Hampton before his life’s defining chapter began.

In 1915, following the death of Tuskegee founder Booker T. Washington, Moton was chosen to succeed him as the institution’s second principal. He led Tuskegee for 20 years, until his retirement in 1935. While continuing the school’s work-study tradition, he broadened its mission, strengthening the faculty, expanding the campus, and introducing bachelor’s degrees in agriculture and education.

Moton’s influence reached well beyond Alabama. He attended the First Pan-African Congress in Paris in 1919, and in 1922 he delivered the keynote address at the dedication of the Lincoln Memorial in Washington, D.C., though, in a stark reminder of the era, he and other Black attendees were seated in a segregated section. He went on to receive honorary degrees from Harvard, Howard, Oberlin, Williams, and several other institutions, along with the Harmon Award in Race Relations in 1930 and the NAACP’s Spingarn Medal in 1932.

His Phi Beta Sigma brotherhood placed him in remarkable company. The Gamma Sigma chapter at Tuskegee also claimed George Washington Carver, the famed agricultural scientist, who was one of its charter members. Two of the most consequential figures in the history of Black education shared the same fraternal bond.

Moton died on May 31, 1940, at his home, Holly Knoll, in Gloucester County, Virginia. His name endures across the institutions he served: at Hampton University, Moton Hall, completed in 1964, honors his decades there, and at Tuskegee, Moton Field, the airfield where the Tuskegee Airmen trained during World War II, carries his name. It is a fitting tribute to a man who embodied Phi Beta Sigma’s motto of “Culture for Service and Service for Humanity.”

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