Mammy: An Appeal to the Heart of the South (Classic Reprint)
(Excerpt from Mammy: An Appeal to the Heart of the South
...)
Excerpt from Mammy: An Appeal to the Heart of the South
She, now past eighty, is still digging in the garden of a grand child who gave her shelter. Her best days are gone. Others enjoy the fruits of her many years of labor.
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(This book was originally published prior to 1923, and rep...)
This book was originally published prior to 1923, and represents a reproduction of an important historical work, maintaining the same format as the original work. While some publishers have opted to apply OCR (optical character recognition) technology to the process, we believe this leads to sub-optimal results (frequent typographical errors, strange characters and confusing formatting) and does not adequately preserve the historical character of the original artifact. We believe this work is culturally important in its original archival form. While we strive to adequately clean and digitally enhance the original work, there are occasionally instances where imperfections such as blurred or missing pages, poor pictures or errant marks may have been introduced due to either the quality of the original work or the scanning process itself. Despite these occasional imperfections, we have brought it back into print as part of our ongoing global book preservation commitment, providing customers with access to the best possible historical reprints. We appreciate your understanding of these occasional imperfections, and sincerely hope you enjoy seeing the book in a format as close as possible to that intended by the original publisher.
Charlotte Hawkins Brown was an African-American educator. She was a teacher and founder of the Palmer Memorial Institute, a trailblazing Southern prep school for African-American students.
Background
Charlotte Hawkins Brown was born on June 11, 1883 in Henderson, North Carolina, on land that was formerly part of the Hawkins plantation. Her father, Edmund H. Hight, from whom she was separated after birth, belonged to a family that had grown up as slaves on the adjoining plantation. Her mother, Caroline F. Hawkins, was the twelfth child of Mingo and Rebecca, slaves on the Hawkins plantation.
er mother, Caroline F. Hawkins, was the twelfth child of Mingo and Rebecca, slaves on the Hawkins plantation. When Lottie, as Charlotte was called, was about six, she moved with her mother; her stepfather, a Mr. Willis; and sixteen other members of her family to Cambridge, Massachussets.
Education
Although Lottie was expected to help with her mother's hand laundry enterprise, she also attended Allston Grammar School and Cambridge English High and Latin School, from which she graduated in 1900. Her mother thought this was sufficient education, but Lottie displayed the pragmatism, assertiveness, and determination that were to mark her later endeavors. She convinced her mother that a two-year normal-school course would improve her chances of obtaining a teaching job.
While looking through school catalogs she spied the name of Alice F. Palmer, who was on the board of education in Massachusetts and a former president of Wellesley College. During the previous spring, Palmer had observed Lottie in a Cambridge park wheeling the baby for whom she was caring and reading from her high school Virgil text. Lottie was later flattered to learn that the lady, who had stopped briefly to chat with her, was Alice Palmer and that she had called her high school principal to learn her name.
Recalling this expression of interest, Lottie wrote Palmer about her desire to attend normal school. Palmer promptly volunteered to pay her expenses, and Lottie began at State Normal School in Salem, Massachussets, that fall.
Career
In October of Brown's second year at Salem, a field secretary for the American Missionary Association (AMA) offered her a teaching job in the South, where the demand for teachers was great. With the completion of disenfranchisement by the 1890's, education had emerged in the minds of many blacks as being the only route toward an improved status in society.
At the same time, southern school boards denied blacks a fair portion of tax money for their schools.
Private schools, supported by agencies like the Baptist AMA, seemed the only hope for education for blacks. Within days Brown had arranged for a leave from her school and was on a train bound for McLeansville, a whistle-stop eight miles from Greensboro, North Carolina, near the one-room schoolhouse of Sedalia where she was to teach. Salem agreed to her leaving with the understanding that she would return the following summer to complete the two-year course.
Although she never returned, a diploma was eventually awarded on the basis of evaluation of her teaching. The First Grade Certificate for which she qualified was signed November 1, 1901. Brown never abandoned the task she so resolutely began the morning of October 12, 1901, when she met the fifteen children who straggled into the unkempt building housing Sedalia Institute.
A year later, when the AMA moved to close all of its one- and two-room schools, she decided to found her own school at Sedalia.
The summer of 1902 found her back in Massachusetts, raising funds for the new venture. Although only nineteen, she approached persons in Boston recommended to her by Palmer and solicited money in the resort hotels of Gloucester where she had once held summer jobs. Back in Sedalia with nearly $400, fifteen acres donated by friends, and the loan of an old blacksmith shop, she inaugurated Palmer Memorial Institute. The school, named after her benefactress, was an industrial institute modeled after Hampton and Tuskegee.
By the mid-1930's it had nearly 300 students. Four hundred acres of land and fourteen buildings, valued at over $1 million, attested to Brown's untiring efforts to develop the school. It became a leader among the fifteen private educational enterprises for blacks that emerged in North Carolina between 1870 and 1910.
President Charles W. Eliot of Harvard headed its first board of trustees. The school attracted significant contributions from the North as well as the South and made a remarkable contribution to the education of the southern blacks. It filled a gap in a state that had no accredited teacher-training facilities for blacks until the 1930's and in a community where no tax-supported public school was open to blacks until 1937. In that year a public school for blacks was finally opened. This and financial problems forced the institute to merge with Bennett College in Greensboro in 1971.
Gaining several firsts for black women, she was appointed to the State Council of Defense in North Carolina in 1940 and to the national board of the Young Women's Christian Association. Although Brown retired as president of Palmer in 1952, she remained director of finance until 1955.
She died in Greensboro, North Carolina.
Achievements
Charlotte Hawkins Brown devoted her life to the improvement of the African American community's social standing and was active in the National Council of Negro Women. Among her numerous institutional efforts, she served on the national board of the Young Women's Christian Association, the first black woman to do so. In 1952 Brown retired as president of Palmer Memorial Institute. She was the first African American woman named to the national board of the YWCA.
She was also interested in the improvement of prison conditions and the education of inmates' children, sponsorship of local health clinics and child care centers, voter registration campaigns, and furtherance of the family-owned farm concept. She was in great demand as a speaker.
A gradualist in racial matters, Brown succeeded in effecting marked integration in her local community. She worked for equal rights by concrete actions in the coffee shops of Greensboro and in the larger arenas of the state and nation.
The site of Palmer Memorial Institute is now a museum, honoring Brown's work to help African-American students.
Charlotte Brown was a member of the Young Women's Christian Association. She was also an honorary member of Alpha Kappa Alpha sorority.
Connections
Charlotte Hawkins Brown married Edward S. Brown on June 12, 1911. In a sense, Palmer Memorial Institute was Brown's life; her home was the residence of pupils too young for the dormitory and those who were unable to return home summers. Edward S. Brown taught and had charge of the boys' dormitory for several years until he accepted a teaching position elsewhere. Divorce followed; they had no children.
