In celebration of Black History Month, the Gloucester Institute will offer a tour Feb.
19 of historic in Gloucester, led by local historian Dr. Dorothy Cooke, Rep. Rob Wittman and other community leaders. The tour begins at 5 p.m., followed by a reception at 6 p.m. The house was the retirement home of the late Dr. Robert Russa Moton, a civil rights leader whose life work was empowering African-Americans to lead self-sufficient lives. Moton’s mother, a former slave, secretly taught to him to read. He later worked in a lumber yard and saved enough money to attend Hampton Institute, where he met and was influenced by prominent black thinkers.
Moton was the keynote speaker at the dedication of the Lincoln Memorial in 1922. At that event he pledged: “With malice toward none, with charity for all, we dedicate ourselves and our posterity, with you and yours, to finish the work which he began, to make America an example for all the world of equal justice, equal opportunity for all.”