Perhaps the greatest of those advocates whom the South loves to refer to as "educational statesmen" was Dr.Charles D.McIver, of Greensboro, N.C.

McIver's personality and career had an heroic quality all their own.

Back in the 'eighties McIver and Edwin A.Alderman, now President of the University of Virginia, endured all kinds of hardships and buffetings in the cause of popular education; they stumped the state, much like political campaigners, preaching the strange new gospel in mountain cabin, in village church, at the cart's tail--all in an attempt to arouse their lethargic countrymen to the duty of laying a small tax to save their children from illiteracy.

Some day the story of McIver and Alderman will find its historian; when it does, he will learn that, in those dark ages, one of their greatest sources of inspiration was Walter Page.
McIver, a great burly boy, physically and intellectually, so full of energy that existence for him was little less than an unending tornado, so full of zeal that any other occupation than that of training the neglected seemed a trifling with life, so sleepless in his efforts that, at the age of forty-five, he one day dropped dead while travelling on a railroad train; Alderman, a man of finer culture, quieter in his methods, an orator of polish and restraint, but an advocate vigorous in the prosecution of the great end; and Page, living faraway in the North, but pumping his associates full of courage and enthusiasm--these were the three guardsmen of this new battle for the elevation of the white and black men of the South.

McIver's great work was the State Normal College for Women, which, amid unparalleled difficulties, he founded for teaching the teachers of the new Southern generation.