If Charlotte Hawkins Brown had owned a cell phone, her contact list would have included the likes of Booker T. Washington, Alice Freeman Palmer and First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt.
Born in South Henderson in 1883, Brown became synonymous with the Palmer Institute, a private preparatory high school for African American students in Guilford County that reached its heyday in the 1920s and ‘30s. Her network of wealthy benefactors kept the school in good fiscal shape from its inception in 1902 through the Depression. It closed in 1971.
Her maiden name was Hawkins, and she is descended from John Davis Hawkins, who owned 8,000 acres in the Gillburg area – there’s still a grove of pecan trees near the old prison camp where his home was located, according to local historian Mark Pace.
Pace and Bill Harris discussed Brown’s life and legacy on Thursday’s tri-weekly history segment of Town Talk.
An only child, Brown and her parents moved to Cambridge, Mass. when she was a young girl. They left the oppressive Jim Crow South for other places, as did many African Americans of that time. Cambridge is home to Harvard, Wellesley and Radcliffe, and the young Miss Hawkins was exposed to a center of education and knowledge, Pace said.
She graduated from Harvard at 18 and came back to North Carolina to “run, sight-unseen (the) Bethany Institute,” he said. This school was run by the American Missionary Association in Sedalia, in Guilford County.
But after a 4.5 mile walk from the train station to the school, she found upwards of 50 barefooted schoolchildren having class in a cramped blacksmith shop, Pace said.
Undeterred, the young educator stayed in Sedalia, started her own school named in honor of her dear friend Alice Freeman Palmer, who had been instrumental as a mentor and friend.
“She stayed there for the next 60 years,” Pace said.
The Palmer Institute in Sedalia, now a state historic site, was “the” place for wealthy African American families to send their high school-aged children. It was a private school, Pace said, and Brown encouraged – insisted – that the Palmer students carry themselves with respect and dignity at all times. Young ladies shopping in nearby Greensboro were required to wear white gloves, for example, Pace said.
In fact, Brown wrote an etiquette book that included a whole chapter on the proper use of the telephone. A criterion for graduation was to recite whole passages from that book, Pace noted.
Some of those bits of etiquette still ring true today:
“It is not necessary to talk loud to be heard” was a particular favorite of Brown’s, he said.
The school garnered respect and support from all across the nation, and Pace said it was arguably the most prominent African American preparatory high school in the United States in its heyday.
And Brown’s networking prowess helped to create and sustain that reputation. She appeared on radio shows nationwide, and the Sedalia Singers performed at the White House.
“She was very good at promoting the school,” he said.
Failing health prompted her retirement in 1952, and Brown died in 1961 at age 78.
She was a little bit of a thing – not even five feet tall – but she still cut an imposing figure in the field of education throughout her career.
Some would say that career in education began even before she was herself a student – she was reading at age 3 and speaking in public, under the tutelage of Alice Palmer, before she was 7.
Brown earned numerous degrees and honors, and even found time to be a symphony conductor.
“She was probably the most educated person ever to come out of Vance County,” Pace offered.
Her descendants include the late singer Natalie Cole and Guion “Guy” Bluford, the first African American astronaut in space.
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