Charlotte Hawkins Brown and Palmer Memorial Institute: What One Young African American Woman Could Do

In the fall of 1901, Charlotte Hawkins Brown (1883–1961) jumped off a Southern Railway train in the unfamiliar backwoods of Guilford County, North Carolina. She was black, single, and barely eighteen years old and had come alone from Cambridge, Massachusetts, to begin her first real job as a teacher at a small, struggling school for African Americans.

She stayed for over half a century. When the failing school was closed at the end of her first year, Brown remained to carry on. With virtuall...