Charlotte Hawkins Brown

Educator

• Born: June 11, 1883
• Birthplace: Henderson, North Carolina
• Died: January 11, 1961
• Place of death: Greensboro, North Carolina

Brown devoted her life to extending education to those who had been denied such opportunities because of their race. She founded the Alice Freeman Palmer Memorial Institute in Sedalia, North Carolina, in 1902. The school, which closed in 1971 and became a state historic site, was positioned as a model of educational uplift.

Early Life

Charlotte Eugenia Hawkins Brown was born on June 11, 1883, in Henderson, North Carolina, to Caroline Frances Hawkins. The identity of her father is unknown. Her maternal grandparents had been slaves on large plantations in what is now Vance County, North Carolina. Brown had a privileged childhood by the standards of the day. Because it was believed that her grandmother, Rebecca, was the daughter of the prominent planter and lawyer John D. Hawkins, her mother had been reared by an affluent white aunt and attained many of the social and cultural advantages typically held solely by whites of the era. Brown was thus born and raised in a well-kept black middle-class section of town, in a home in which cultural and intellectual achievement were emphasized. This background would later influence her pioneering work in higher education.

Although Brown enjoyed advantages rarely afforded most southern African Americans, the pervasive oppression of Jim Crow North Carolina prompted the family to migrate to Boston in 1888. They settled in an integrated neighborhood in Cambridge. There, she took voice and piano lessons, and attended highly regarded primary and high schools. She cited her major role models during that time as Maria L. Baldwin, a respected and influential educator in Cambridge, and Lucy Craft Laney, an education reformer in the South. The work of these two African American women, along with the influence of her teachers, prompted Brown’s interest in postsecondary education. By the time she graduated from high school in 1900, she had a strong desire to become a teacher.

During her senior year in high school, Brown met Alice Freeman Palmer, who was then the chairwoman of the fellowship committee of the American Association of University Women and a member of the state board of education. Brown, who had aspired to attend Radcliffe, had been unable to convince her mother of the practicality of attending a four-year college. They eventually agreed on a compromise in which Brown would attend a two-year program at one of the nearby normal schools. With Palmer’s assistance and financial support, she enrolled in the state normal school at Salem in the fall of 1900. The following spring, she met the field secretary for the American Missionary Association (AMA), the chief Christian philanthropic agency charged with the operation of schools for African Americans in the South. She soon left her studies to return to her native North Carolina to become a teacher.

Life’s Work

In October of 1901, Brown arrived in the rural town of McLeansville to begin teaching at the Bethany Institute. She was initially shocked and disappointed to find the school in a dilapidated condition. In spite of her disillusionment with her working conditions, she was determined to meet the challenge and press ahead with what she saw as her mission of racial uplift through education. Her convictions were further strengthened when her students arrived for the first time on October 10, 1901. Brown noticed that not only were many of her pupils’ educational achievements far below the standards to which she had been accustomed in Boston, but also that many of them had to walk great distances to attend school. For this reason, some students missed many days of instruction because of harsh weather during the winter months. As a solution to this problem, Brown received permission from the school’s principal to convert an old blacksmith’s shop across the road from the school into a dormitory for female students. Shortly thereafter, she opened a dormitory for boys near the school.

As a northern-educated African American woman in the South at the turn of the twentieth century, Brown faced many obstacles. She experienced prejudice from both African Americans and whites in the community and was under constant pressure to secure supplemental funding for a school in a rural area of a region that did not prioritize education, particularly for African Americans. Nevertheless, she was shocked when, in 1902, the AMA announced it would close the Bethany Institute. She was then given a choice between accepting a teaching assignment at another school and operating the school on her own. At the behest of members of the community, she chose to stay. This decision meant that she would have to work even harder to secure funds for the school. That summer, she returned to New England to contact prospective donors.

In the fall of 1902, Brown returned to North Carolina and became the first black woman to establish a state normal school. During this time, she cultivated relationships with many affluent white northern and southern financial benefactors. Palmer, who had been providing fund-raising support to Brown, died suddenly that year. As a show of gratitude for the assistance and encouragement she had received, Brown named the school the Alice Freeman Palmer Institute. It offered industrial, domestic, and manual training, which was consistent with Booker T. Washington’s philosophy of racial uplift and enabled the school to attract the support of white donors. The curriculum also emphasized arithmetic, literature, foreign languages, and other advanced courses, in keeping with Brown’s own educational background. Brown’s tenacity and dedication to her mission eventually resulted in the development of a sprawling campus with an excellent reputation.

By 1941, the state had begun funding public schools for African American students, and Palmer’s enrollment began to decline. Undeterred, Brown reinvented the Palmer Institute as an elite boarding school with an emphasis on culture. In keeping with her objective to advance cultural training as a means of racial uplift, she published her book, The Correct Thing to Do, to Say, and to Wear, in 1941. In 1952, she stepped down as president of the school after fifty years at its head. Several years later, on January 11, 1961, Brown died of complications from diabetes. She was buried on the school grounds.

Significance

Brown worked to provide a liberal education for African Americans during an era in which industrial education was widely believed to represent the best avenue for economic and social advancement. She continued her pioneering efforts in education beyond her founding of the Palmer Institute, participating in numerous civic organizations designed to foster racial uplift. In 1909, she became a founder of the North Carolina Federation of Negro Women’s Clubs and formed the School Improvement League in Sedalia. She also became a member and, later, president of the North Carolina Teachers Association. She was awarded an honorary doctorate from Wilberforce University in 1932, and from Tuskegee Institute in 1952. The Charlotte Hawkins Brown Memorial, dedicated in Greensboro in 1987, stands as a symbol of African American contributions to the educational and social history of North Carolina.

Bibliography

Fairclough, Adam. A Class of Their Own: Black Teachers in the Segregated South. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2007. Provides a narrative description of the Jim Crow social limitations under which pioneering black educators in the South, including Brown, were forced to labor in order to achieve their objectives.

Reynolds, Katherine, and Susan Schramm. A Separate Sisterhood: Women Who Shaped Southern Education in the Progressive Era. New York: Peter Lang, 2002. An important contextual resource on the conditions under which Brown directed her efforts, this work situates her efforts among those of other female educational reformers of the early twentieth century.

Wadelington, Charles, and Richard Knapp. Charlotte Hawkins Brown and Palmer Memorial Institute: What One Young African American Woman Could Do. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999. A biography of Brown that provides a detailed account of her tenure as the founder and president of the Palmer Institute.