Day 11 - Charlotte Hawkins Brown

Charlotte Hawkins Brown, a pioneer in education and race relations, was born on a farm near Henderson, the granddaughter of a slave. Her mother, Caroline Frances Hawkins, moved to Cambridge, Mass., when Charlotte was a small child; there she married Edmund Hawkins, a brick mason.

Described by family and friends as a precocious child, Charlotte Hawkins distinguished herself as a superior student and a gifted musician in the Cambridge public schools. She attended Allston Grammar School and the Cambridge English High School. As a high school senior she met a woman who was to have a profound influence on her life, and the chance meeting was a story she never tired of telling. Employed as a babysitter for a Cambridge family, she was one day rolling a baby carriage down the street with one hand while carrying a copy of Virgil in the other. The juxtaposition attracted the attention of a passerby - Alice Freeman Palmer, second president of Wellesley College —who took an immediate interest in young Charlotte Hawkins

Hawkins was persuaded to return to her native North Carolina to serve the American Missionary Association. After receiving permission to leave Salem Normal School prior to the graduation of her class, she returned south on 10 Oct. 1901, bound for what she thought was a well-established mission school at McLeansville, a whistle-stop eight miles east of Greensboro.

From these meager beginnings made even more desperate by the American Missionary Association's decision to close the school in 1902, Charlotte Hawkins worked to establish a new kind of school in rural North Carolina. She created at Sedalia a school that emulated the New England ideal in combination with the best of industrial education. A fierce fundraiser, she returned to Massachusetts to solicit funds for her school. 

Charlotte Hawkins reorganized the school and named it the Palmer Memorial Institute, in honor of Alice Freeman Palmer, who had died in 1902. The first class met in a remodeled blacksmith's shed, and with the strong support of the people in the community the school survived. Her persistence on the school's behalf gradually found for her the support of Boston philanthropists.

As her school grew in size and reputation, Charlotte Hawkins achieved state and national recognition.

She resigned the presidency of Palmer Memorial Institute in 1952, to be succeeded by her associate and former student Wilhelmina M. Crosson; she continued to serve as director of finance until 1955. Poor health sharply curtailed her activities in her later years, although she retained her strong interest in the school she had founded until her death at L. Richardson Memorial Hospital in Greensboro.