Charlotte Eugenia Hawkins Brown was born in North Carolina in 1883. She was five when her family moved to Cambridge, Massachusetts seeking better educational and economic opportunities. Charlotte was mentored and supported by Alice Freeman Palmer, the first woman president of Wellesley College, who recommended the Salem Normal School to the aspiring teacher. She matriculated in 1900 and was recruited a year later to teach in a rural area east of Greensboro, North Carolina by a member of the American Missionary Association (AMA).
The AMA, which began as an abolitionist group, started supporting education for the formerly enslaved during the Civil War. When the AMA school closed, Charlotte began a solo fundraising campaign to reopen it as an independent school. With the help of Mrs. Palmer and her many friends in the Boston area, Brown opened the Alice Freeman Palmer Memorial Institute in 1902 with the mission to "conduct and maintain an institution for the colored race...to teach improved methods of agriculture." By 1940, the school had shifted focus from industrial and agricultural education to a liberal arts curriculum. Brown recruited two Salem Normal School graduates, Olivia Stead and Wilhelmina Crosson, to teach at Palmer. Crosson took over leadership of the school when Brown retired in 1952. By the time she left, the school had become a nationally recognized and prominent college preparatory school for African-American children. Brown died in 1961. The school she built closed ten years later - it is now a North Carolina Historic Site and the home of the Charlotte Hawkins Brown Museum.
_______________________________________
Digitized Archives
Charlotte Hawkins Brown
Forty-Seventh Year of the State Normal School at Salem, Mass., 1900-1901
0 Comments.