for over fifty years. Resilient, purposeful, on occasion audacious, she was one of the unheralded black women whose lives centered around the education of African Americans. Yet no comprehensive scholarship on her accomplishments and on the forces that influenced her occurred until the publication of Charlotte Hawkins Brown and Palmer Memorial Institute: What One Young African American Woman Could Do by Charles Wadelington and Richard Knapp, 1999. Co-authors Wadelington and Knapp hold extraordinary credentials to raise Charlotte Hawkins Brown to her appropriate place in the history of education. Both are associates of the historic sites section of the North Carolina Department of Cultural Resources. Wadelington, now retired, was a minority interpretations specialist for all twentyseven North Carolina historic sites. In this position, he researched African American and Native American history in North Carolina to ensure its accuracy and inclusion in all of the state’s historical sites. Knapp is the curator of research for the North Carolina Division of Historic Sites. He oversees research for all historic sites in the state and worked on both the book and on the creation of the Charlotte Hawkins Brown Memorial.
Charlotte Hawkins Brown, alumna of Salem Normal School, ’02, a driven force in African American education for over fifty years. Resilient, purposeful, on occasion audacious, she was one of the unheralded black women whose lives centered around the education of African Americans. Conscious of the intersection of biography and history, Wadelington and Knapp ensure that readers understand the context that informed Charlotte’s life and work. Whereas the emancipation of more than three million enslaved people occurred twenty years before Brown’s birth in 1883, freed men and women, North and South, faced indefensible and insurmountable obstacles in their efforts to obtain equality. The political gains of Reconstruction were repealed or unraveled through fear and intimidation. Opportunity for education and economic progress far exceeded the reach of the black sharecropper, domestic, or laborer, positions in which nearly all southern blacks found themselves. The first Great Migration of blacks to the North (1877) was yet in its infancy. The Ku Klux Klan, gaining authority and influence from 1882 to 1891, lynched 732 African Americans, a figure that would rise to 1,124 in the following decade according to U.S. Bureau of the Census. Meticulously researched by Wadelington and Knapp, Charlotte Hawkins Brown thoroughly portrays a life and a
culture seldom referenced in mainstream history books. The authors poured over primary sources, conducted interviews with alumni, faculty, and supporters of Palmer Memorial Institute, and incorporated resources from research centers, archives, photograph collections, and libraries — including the Elizabeth Schlesinger Library of Radcliffe College where Brown’s papers are housed. Over seventy pages of notes and bibliography provide the reader not only with documentation but also leads for further study. Eminently readable, at home on the bedside table as well as in the classroom, this book delights and informs scholars as well as the casual reader. That this book is a labor of love is evident throughout. Charlotte’s birth in the same vicinity where her grandparents had been slaves placed her in the midst of a historical drama played out all across the nineteenth-century South. Family history held that light skinned Rebecca Hawkins, Charlotte’s grandmother, was a descendant of John Hawkins, the Elizabethan English navigator. Rebecca’s father was widely believed to be John Davis Hawkins, son of a planter and brother of North Carolina governor William Hawkins. Rebecca’s freeborn child, Caroline Francis, or Carrie, found favor with her mother’s white, unmarried half-sister, Jane Hawkins, and lived with her for a time. Jane encouraged Carrie to hold high values and to become a “colored lady” (although few whites believed such could exist) and instilled in Carrie the best of upper-class white cultural values. Carrie broke Jane’s heart by giving birth to Charlotte without the benefit of marriage or even acknowledging the father. Carrie, a devout Christian in spite of her lapse, returned to her mother’s home. Thus, Charlotte Hawkins was born into one of the most prominent African American families in Henderson, North Carolina. Steeped in upper class values, Grandmother Rebecca, her husband Mingo, and Carrie nurtured Charlotte in a home and community that shielded her from the post-Reconstruction discrimination and violence outside their home. Nevertheless, the relative advantages enjoyed by blacks in the North led the Hawkins family to migrate to Cambridge, Massachusetts in 1888. Although most blacks in Massachusetts labored in menial jobs and endured discrimination, the Hawkins family found the safety and freedom unavailable to them in the South. 21