Image description: Top row: Dr. Brown as a younger woman; Dr. Charlotte Hawkins Brown, circa. 1930. ;The Sedalia Quartet, Dr. Charlotte Hawkins Brown (lower right).
All Photos courtesy of North Carolina Historic Sites.

Bottom row: Dr Charlotte Hawkins Brown with student in her office at Palmer Memorial Institute.
This photo is part of the Griff Davis collection, photo shoot for Ebony Magazine, 1947.

Dr. C. H. Brown with Maria, Nat King, and Cookie Cole celebrating a birthday--March 3, 1958, at Palmer Memorial Institute. Maria Cole is Dr. Browns niece, her brother Mingo's daughter .
.

Charlotte Hawkins was the granddaughter of formerly enslaved grandparents. Her mother, Caroline Frances
moved her family to Cambridge, Massachusetts when Charlotte and her brother Mingo were both young children. The racism up north was not as bad as it was in North Carolina.

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. On learning that the girl planned to enter the State Normal School at Salem, Mass., following high school graduation, Mrs. Palmer insisted on assuming responsibility for her expenses.

Palmer was so impressed by Brown's diligence at pursuing an advanced education that she helped sponsor Brown's schooling. She also introduced Brown to many important people in Boston, society people she would later approach to help with her school.

After a year of junior college, Brown accepted a 25-dollar-a-month job from the American Missionary Association (AMA) and returned to her home state of North Carolina to teach poor, rural Black students.
In 1902, Charlotte Hawkins Brown took the train from her home in Cambridge, Massachusetts to the rural town of Sedalia, North Carolina. What would compel a barely-nineteen-year-old African American woman to move from a relatively comfortable life in a progressive northeastern city to the deeply segregated Jim Crow South? Pulled by providence, Brown felt that the chance to teach at an American Missionary Association (AMA) school was God calling her home to her birth state of North Carolina.

Bound for what she thought was a well-established mission school at McLeansville, a whistle-stop eight miles east of Greensboro. Four and a half miles from McLeansville, at what would later be called Sedalia, Miss Hawkins found the school, a crude building that served as a combination church and school, peopled with fifty barefoot children.

The Palmer Memorial Institute
When the American Missionary Association decided to close the school a year later, Brown decided to create a school on her own. Coming from humble beginnings in a small blacksmith’s cabin, Brown continued raising money, eventually obtaining 200 acres and constructing two new buildings for her campus. The school was named the Palmer Memorial Institute, in honor of Alice Freeman Palmer, and was a day and boarding school for African Americans.

The girls (students were mostly girls because the boys were needed to work in the fields for their families) slept upstairs in a loft, the teachers slept downstairs, a large room was used for the classes. Teachers and students subsisted on two meals a day, mostly cornbread, molasses, peas, and beans. (credit 5)

Initially Brown followed the vocational curriculum of Booker T. Washington’s Tuskegee Institute, focusing on manual training and industrial education for rural living. But over the half century Brown gradually came to embrace liberal arts education.

As her school grew in size and reputation, Charlotte Hawkins achieved state and national recognition. She spent the academic year 1927–28 studying at Wellesley, and she lectured frequently at Smith, Wellesley, Mt. Holyoke, and Radcliffe colleges, and at Howard University, Hampton Institute, and Tuskegee Institute. She received six honorary degrees, among them honorary doctorates from Lincoln University, Pa., in 1937, Wilberforce University in 1939, and Howard University in 1944.

During her tenure at Palmer, Brown actively toured, speaking on behalf of women’s suffrage and racial equality. She devoted her life to the improvement of the African American community’s social standing and was active in the National Council of Negro Women, an organization founded by celebrated educator Mary McLeod Bethune in 1935. As president of the North Carolina State Federation of Negro Women’s Clubs, Brown also directed African American women’s formal civic experiences for more than 20 years.

More than a thousand students attended the school from 1902 to 1970, when it closed. Today the Charlotte Hawkins Brown Museum is housed in the buildings of the Palmer Memorial Institute. The nonprofit Charlotte Hawkins Brown Historical Foundation works cooperatively with the state and other interested individuals and organizations to promote scholarship, research, and the wider preservation and appreciation of North Carolina’s African American heritage.

Charlotte Hawkins Brown created The Sedalia Quartet and they traveled throughout the East Coast region, singing to raise funds for the Palmer Memorial Institute. They were well received by enthusiastic audiences everywhere they performed. Dr. Brown held concerts to promote the school and attract donors.

A remarkable example of achievement in the face of segregation and discrimination, the story of Charlotte Hawkins Brown and her school continues to provide a model of educational success born of dedication and hard work.

Brown's papers are at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University.
......
Brown's brother, Mingo, was the father of jazz singer Maria Hawkins Cole, who became the wife of musician Nat King Cole and the mother of singer Natalie Cole and actress Carole Cole.

Sources: NC Historic Sites- Charlotte Hawkins Brown Museum; Cambridge Black History Project; Wikipedia:
NC History Project