Like the pioneering teacher Charlotte Forten (1837-1914), Charlotte Hawkins Brown was educated in Massachusetts and then devoted a good part of her life to dispensing that knowledge to students in the South. But unlike Forten, born in Philadelphia and the offspring of an illustrious and influential family, Brown was the granddaughter of a slave and born June 11, 1883, in Henderson, N.C. When she was seven, her family moved to Cambridge, Mass.
Both Charlottes were beneficiaries of Massachusetts’ enlightened educational system, Forten in Salem and Brown in Cambridge. As a teenager, Brown was babysitting when she met Alice Freeman Palmer, the second president of Wellesley College. According to several accounts, Brown was pushing a baby stroller and reading aloud from a Latin book when Palmer overheard her and later became her mentor.
Brown’s connection to Forten occurs again, although years apart, when she attended Salem Normal School, a junior college, where she received an offer from the American Missionary Association to teach in Sedalia, N. C., a small rural community. By 1901, she was sequestered in the South again, and dedicated much of her time and energy to improving the community and the educational dreams of its residents.
But the AMA, given her small school’s state of disrepair, decided to close it. Brown was disconsolate and despite the pleas on the part of the residents for her to stay, she returned to Massachusetts. Upon returning to the state, she resumed her relationship with Palmer, who counseled her to continue her plans for a school. With this renewed inspiration, Brown began her fundraising campaign to get the money she needed to found the school.
In 1902, she established the Palmer Memorial Institute, a preparatory school for African-Americans in Sedalia, naming it after her mentor and benefactor. It didn’t take long before the school was heralded for its academic excellence. Praised for her leadership and educational prominence, Brown was soon championed by such notables as Booker T. Washington, Mary McLeod Bethune and Eleanor Roosevelt. Brown was a suffragette and an outspoken foe of the Jim Crow laws, and was often invited to speak at various institutions and community organizations across the country.
Meanwhile, her school continued to grow and to expand its curriculum to include classes consistent with junior college courses.
Over the next score of years, when not administering to her students at Palmer, Brown was on the road, discussing civil rights concerns and providing words of uplift and encouragement. Many of her most inspirational speeches were delivered at social functions and church assemblies.
Typical of her speeches was the one she gave against lynching at the Women’s Interracial Conference in Memphis, Tenn., Oct. 8, 1920: “Friends, what do you say about the cold-heartedness that we have felt? I told you to begin with, that we have become a little bit discouraged. We have begun to feel that you are not, after all, interested in us and I am going still further. The Negro women of the South lay everything that happens to the members of her race at the door of the Southern white woman. Just why I don’t know, but we all feel that you can control your men. We feel so far as lynching is concerned that, if the white woman would take hold of the situation that lynching would be stopped, mob violence stamped out and yet the guilty would have justice meted out by due course of law and would be punished accordingly.
We do not condone criminality. We do not want our men to do anything that would make you feel that they were trying to destroy the chastity of our white women and, on the other hand, I want to say to you, when you read in the paper where a colored man has insulted a white woman, just multiply that by one thousand and you have some idea of the number of colored women insulted by white men.”
The spirit and letter of this speech appeared in a short story she wrote a year before entitled “Mammy: An Appeal to the Heart of the South.” In another publication, “The Correct Thing to Do, to Say, and to Wear,” she wrote about etiquette and good behavior.
Brown devoted 50 years to guiding Palmer Memorial Institute, finally retiring in October 1952. From 1911 to 1915, she was married to Ed Brown. She had no children of her own, but she did raise several children of relatives, including her brother Mingo’s daughters and her Aunt Ella Brice’s four children.
One of her memorable quotes was, “I sit in a Jim Crow car, but my mind keeps company with the kings and queens I have known. External constraints must not be allowed to segregate mind or soul.”
She died Jan. 11, 1961, in Greensboro, N.C. Ten years later Palmer closed. Bennett College purchased the Palmer campus, but in 1980 it sold 40 acres of the main campus with major surviving buildings to the American Muslim Mission. The Muslims attempted to establish a teacher’s college for a short time, but on much of the campus the decay that began in 1971 continued unabated, according to one account.
The site of Palmer Memorial Institute is now the Charlotte Hawkins Brown Museum, a tribute to her tireless advocacy of education to Black students.