Five-year-old Elsie cried when her older brother went to school because she couldn’t go, too. She went anyway, unenrolled, though she was younger than the minimum starting age by a few months. She credited the head start with her graduation from Dinwiddie Training School, an all-black high school, at age 15 and college at 19. Dr. Elsie Goodwyn Holland was born in 1935 in McKenney in rural Dinwiddie County, the daughter of a school janitor. She earned a bachelor’s degree from Virginia State College (now a university) in 1955 and her master’s there in 1969. She was 37 when she moved to an apartment in Charlottesville to earn her doctorate in elementary education from the University of Virginia, graduating in 1975. Her husband continued to live and work in Richmond.