"Charlotte Eugenia Hawkins Brown"{ June 11 1883-January 11 1961}

Born Lottie Hawkins in Henderson North Carolina,She was the daughter  of Carolina Frances

 

Hawkins and Edmund H. Hight.Her mother and stepfather,Nelson Willis,along with nineteen extended family members,moved from Henderson to Cambridge,Massachusetts,When Lottie was seven years old.After graduating from high school and changing her name to Charlotte Eugenia,Brown attended the State Normal School in Salem, Massachusetts,for two years.In 1901 she accepted a position with the American Missionary Association (AMA) to teach at a one-room school housed in a run-down church in Sedalia,North Carolina.The AMA a nondenominational society,worked to develop educational opportunities for African Americans during and after the Civil War and founded more than five hundred schools for blacks in the South.Charlotte school consisted of fifty children from the surrounding poor area of Guilford County,North Carolina.She spent most of her first year's purchasing clothes and school supplies for the children,Shortly after her arrived at the school,the AMA decided to close the majority of its one-and two teacher schools and ceased funding from her school.Sedalia's residents persuaded Charlotte then nineteen,to stay and open another school. Community members donated fifteen acres of land,and the minister of Bethany Congregational Church donated a building.She named the school the Alice Freeman Palmer Memorial Institute.Alice,the second president of Wellesley College,had paid for Charlotte two years of education at the State Normal School of Salem and had promised to discuss the Sedalia with Charlotte.Alice died before she could keep her promise,but she persuaded Alice friends to provide some financial support for the school.For fifty years,Charlotte served as administrator;teacher,and Fund-raiser of Palmer Institute.She traveled extensively and networked to expand Alice facilities and increase enrollment.By1946 Palmer's net worth was approximately $611,000,and it was the only finishing school of its kind in America.Charlotte married twice. In 1911,she Edward Brown;they separated a year later and divorced in 1916. In October 1923,she married John W.Moses;this marriage was annulled in less than a year.She had no children but raised several of her nieces and nephews and served as surrogate mother to many of Palmer's students.Like other black educators,she not only established schools,and worked with and within public schools systems,she also addressed problems in African American communities through a host of organizations.To improve the social plight of African Americans,especially children,during the Jim Crow era,she and other teachers worked with and tried to influence organizations such as state Federation of Negro Women Clubs,the National Council of Negro Women (NACW), the National Council of Negro Women (NCNW),teachers, associations,and parent-teacher associations.Charlotte helped organize the North Carolina State Federation of Negro Women's Clubs (NCFNW) in 1909 and served as president from about 1912 to 1936.She was also a member of the NACW and the National Federation of Afro-American Women. She served as president of the North Carolina Teachers Associations from 1935 to 1937 and was a founding member of the NCNW.In the 1920s Charlotte led the efforts of the NCFNW to establish the Efland Home for delinquent girls in North Carolina.During the Jim Crow era,black women developed strategies ti increase access to local state,and national resources at a time when many county and state officals were reluctant or unable to provide such resources for the economic status of rural blacks.For decades,Charlotte worked with state and national institutions as well as local groups to offer a quality education to African Americans students.While supporting a home for wayward girls under the auspieces of the NCFNW,she worked for more than twenty-five years with state,public,and private agencies, trying to persuade North Carolina legislators to take over responsibility for the institution.Around 1907 she organized a Home Ownership Association.Financial support was obtained from the North, and two hundreds acres of land were purchased.She served as an agent for the Northern benefactor and arranged for the sale some of the land to Sedalia community members.The notion of racial uplift as embraced by Charlotte and other African American women educators in the South played a role in changing rural communities for the better.Their daily interactions with and responses to political, econmic and social dynamics, such as disffranchisement,tenancy,and poverty,reveal their motives and the meaning and impact of their efforts.Charlotte experience s allow for a better understanding of their struggle of their to create institutions and improve the social positions of the race in the face of gross inequality and obstruction by the white establishment.