Charlotte Hawkins Brown and Palmer Memorial Institute

Journal of Negro Education, The, Fall 1999 by Durham, Joseph T

Charlotte Hawkins Brown and Palmer Memorial Institute, by Charles Wadelington and Richard F. Knapp. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1999. 303 pp. $16.95, paper; $39.95, cloth.

Reviewed by Joseph T. Durham, Community College of Baltimore and Coppin State College.

If it is true, as Ralph Waldo Emerson observed, that an institution is but the lengthened shadow of one man (or woman), then Palmer Memorial Institute (PM) in Sedalia, North Carolina, was its founder, Charlotte Hawkins Brown, and she was Palmer Memorial Institute. The authors of this volume, both associated with the North Carolina Department of Cultural Resources, have reviewed the life and times of Brown and her beloved institution, an outstanding African American secondary boarding school that existed for almost 70 years. They paint a fascinating portrait of an indomitable Black woman who founded a school and developed a peculiar philosophy of education that appealed to Black parents and clients as well as to prominent, affluent Whites who contributed financially to PMI.

Following essentially a chronological sequence, Wadelington and Knapp place the history of Brown and Palmer Memorial in the context of their times. At the turn of the 20th century, they note, African Americans were experiencing a period of racism, rampant segregation, and lynchings. Into this scenario, a youthful, 18-year-old Charlotte Hawkins, a product of a New England classical education, literally jumped from a train and landed in an isolated part of North Carolina, 10 miles from Sedalia. Hawkins had been engaged by the American Missionary Association to teach at Bethany Institute, but it closed soon after she arrived. A lesser person might have been discouraged, but Hawkins sensed an opportunity and stayed to open her own school in 1902. Under her firm hand, PMI developed into a model finishing school for the children of some of the most distinguished African American families in the United States.

The authors paint Charlotte Hawkins Brown as a study in contrasts. Distinguished by her clipped New England speech and steeped in the classics, she could appeal on one hand to luminaries such as Charles Eliot, president of Harvard from 1869 to 1909; President Franklin Delano Roosevelt; and Alice Freeman Palmer, the second female president of Wellesley College, after whom PMI was named. On the other hand, though she did not fully embrace the industrial education model of Booker T. Washington, Brown believed that Black youth should be trained to work with their hands. She required PMI students to work on the campus farm and to do chores related to the upkeep and maintenance of the school. She was nonetheless influenced by W. E. B. DuBois's concept of the "talented tenth" and called her own philosophy of education "the triangle of achievement." Her goal was to help PMI matriculants become "educationally sufficient, culturally secure, and religiously sincere."

Brown was also an indefatigable fundraiser who traveled extensively, especially in New England, often working long hours without proper food or rest. As a result, she was frequently hospitalized due to exhaustion brought on by overwork. Yet, PMI was Brown's institution. She was its head for a half-century, and was, in a sense, wedded to the school. She married twice, but neither marriage was successful. The first one to Edward S. Brown ended in divorce in 1916; the second to John William Moses was later annulled.

The authors' unrelenting association of Brown with Palmer has both its bright as well as its low spots. On the positive side, they note that Brown successfully garnered funds and support from a wide circle of supporters-the rich and famous of the North as well as southern Whites, who had firm ideas about the intellectual ability of Blacks but who were convinced that Brown's educational plan was sound and beneficial. The negative side of Brown's inseparability from PMI is evident in the toll it took on her health. When, after 50 years of service, the school's board of trustees forced her to retire, Brown came perilously close to a mental breakdown and had to be hospitalized, first in Boston, Massachusetts, and later in Greensboro, North Carolina. She died on January 11, 1961, from complications associated with diabetes.

Following Brown's demise, PMI limped along, first under Wilhemina Crosson, Brown's handpicked successor, then under two African American males who were inexperienced in administration and careless managers. In 1972, in the face of mounting debts and declining enrollments, the school was offered for sale. It was purchased by Bennett College. Later, a Muslim sect purchased the property for a teachers' college. This latter institution did not survive the community hostility, and it closed too. The state of North Carolina then purchased the school and turned it into the state's first historic site commemorating an African American woman. North Carolina has since restored some PMI buildings, notably Canary Cottage, Brown's campus home, and made other improvements.