William McKinley Justice was born November 27, 1893. The shy Pike County boy who would one day become a school teacher, a high-school principal and the author of five books of poetry, never saw the inside of a school room until he was nearly fourteen years old. With an over worked father and a sickly mother, young Willie was needed on the 300 acre family farm on Upper Chloe Creek. Although the one-room school was only half a mile down the holler, Willie had other reasons for not attending. 

“Much as I loved books and learning, I still couldn’t see myself pasted down in the schoolroom,” he says in his autobiography. “Why couldn’t I learn without going to school?”

Inspired by his grandfather William C. Justice, a self-made scholar who read not only the King James Bible but “big books” like Spenser’s The Faerie Queen and The Pilgrim’s Progress, Willie set about educating himself. He had made up his mind to become a teacher and a writer. With his Uncle Jim helping with the “hard words,” he immersed himself in Bunyan, a life of Lincoln, the McGuffey Readers and a book called Heavens, Earth, and Ocean. Under Uncle Jim’s tutelage he was soon reading and writing like his scholarly grandparent.

When young Willie finally joined the scholars in the little wooden school on Chloe, he was working on an eighth-grade level. At age eighteen he graduated with honors and took the test for a first class teaching certificate. He scored 96. 

Following high school Justice enrolled in Berea College, graduating in 1929 with a Bachelor of Arts degree. He spent the next thirty years teaching the youth of Pike County. In 1940 he became principal of Hellier High School, a position he held until 1959. Justice was also an avid promoter of Pikeville College, traveling to many cities in the mid-west and north raising funds for this mountain institution. 

An educator of the first rank, Justice was first of all a poet. Mastering the various forms of formal verse, he wrote of love, nature and God with great wisdom and insight. His five volumes of poetry can be found in most local libraries. In order of publication they are Tears and Laughter and Other Poems, A Man, A Woman and God, Acorns of Gold, This Way Lies Peace and Take Time to Stroll, published in own fine hand writing. His autobiography, to which he referred as his “mountain book,” was a source of personal heartbreak, receiving numerous rejections from publishers. His daughter, the author Alice J. Kinder, rewrote the original manuscript and published it under the title Willie Boy in 1988. 

William McKinley Justice died July 22, 1968, at age 74.

Contributor – Gayle Compton