Charlotte Hawkins Brown

Charlotte Hawkins Brown was born in North Carolina and educated in Cambridge, Massachusetts. A chance encounter with Alice Freeman Palmer, the president of Wellesley College, who met a teenage Brown as Brown was reading in Latin, set her on a path back to the South. In 1902, she founded Palmer Memorial Institute in a converted blacksmith's shop in Sedalia, North Carolina, building it into one of the finest preparatory schools for Black students in the country. As president of the North Carolina Teachers Association, Brown addressed Black teacher networks from Texas to Tennessee and beyond. The archive holds her words and her reach.

Here is a curated selection of her name mentioned in the collection.