Charlotte doesn’t take ‘no’ for an answer

Charlotte Hawkins-Brown and Palmer Memorial Institute

My first memory of Palmer Memorial Institute (PMI) was sitting in the back of my family’s minivan while my father drove us around his hometown of Burlington, North Carolina, sometime in the 1990s. 

I can barely remember the sight of his boyhood home, the high school he graduated from (the year it desegregated, no less), and other places that he showed off that day. But at some point, he got excited when he realized we were near Palmer, and he proudly drove us out of the city limits and into sleepy Sedalia, centered between Burlington and Greensboro.

He told us about how it was one of the first Black colleges in the country (the first one in the South was Shaw University in Raleigh).  As we rolled down the two-lane highway, I expected to come upon a couple of run-down shacks.

Instead, I distinctly remember a sense of pride swelling up in me as the first noble brick building came into view. As we continued the short drive past an entire campus of stately buildings, there was even one with towering white columns gracing its face. I imagined the students sitting in the classrooms, walking the campus, and great minds being filled with the knowledge needed to go out and make the world a better place. 

At the time, I believe my pride was directed toward my beloved home state, that something this beautiful and honorable could take place in an area infamous for being deeply unfair toward Black Americans.

Now, decades later, I know and understand so much more and I think Charlotte Hawkins-Brown, the heart and soul of Palmer, would guffaw at my childish assumptions.

The first incorrect assumption was that the school would be made of shacks just because it educated Black students. There were plenty of those around, of course, including the nearby McCray school. At the time Palmer was founded in 1902, there was only one Black high school in the entire state of North Carolina.

But the turn of the century was a renaissance period in education, and North Carolina-born but Massachusetts-educated Charlotte knew what was possible in her home state if Jim Crow would just get out of her way and let her do it.

Palmer was funded through donations from religious organizations like the American Missionary Association (AMA) and wealthy white Northern benefactors like the school’s namesake, Alice Freeman Palmer. 

This leads me to my second incorrect assumption: that government entities and systems were responsible for Palmer’s success. It’s more like Palmer was successful despite them.

North Carolina, like many Southern states, was agriculturally minded and education wasn’t deemed important enough to take helping hands out of the field, white or Black.   

Charlotte returned North Carolina to teach at the Bethany Institute, a small one-building school. A year later, the AMA closed it down and planned to send her elsewhere. She decided to stay. Against all odds, with no money and no local support, she went back to Massachusetts to raise funds and founded Palmer that fall. 

She was 19 years old.

Over the next 50 years, Charlotte would build a 300-acre campus. She educated students at first in mostly agricultural and domestic pursuits. Later, science, business, and administrative focuses were added. By the 1940s, Palmer had a worldwide reputation for excellence in education and character, its students graduating and going on to further degrees and opportunities unheard of among their American ancestors. 

Charlotte had to constantly fundraise, and on top of that, she advocated for racial justice. It wasn’t enough to prepare her students for the world, she also wanted to prepare the world for her students. She spoke openly and honestly about her experiences with racism and prejudice, calling on people, notably white women, to ally with her against such hate.

“I am teaching our children to put out their heart-aches, to pour out their sorrows, their misunderstandings, at the feet of Jesus Christ, and I know that if you are Christian women, that in the final analysis, you are going to have to reach out for the same hand that I am reaching out for but I know that the dear Lord will not receive it if you are crushing me beneath your feet.” Charlotte Hawkins Brown,
During her speech to an interracial audience at the Women’s Interracial Conference, Memphis, Tennessee, 8 October 1920

Charlotte was a peer to more well-known figures, like Mary McCloud Bethune and W.E.B. DuBois. Like them, she was an agent of change, a woman of courage, and a hero in my view.

Within a decade of her death in 1961, Palmer’s doors closed. It couldn’t stay open without its fiery founder. I can’t help but wonder if the financial burden had been lighter, would the school have found it easier to carry on her life’s work without her?

In 1988, the remaining buildings were listed as a North Carolina State Historic Site. I walked the campus in 2019 while researching my upcoming novel, Maggie’s War. 

In it, two young women struggle to revive a treasured friendship despite Jim Crow laws keeping them apart. Sarah, my Black character, loves books and stories and hopes one day to become a writer. Her intelligence is obvious, and though her education has been spotty, she eventually earns a coveted slot at Palmer Memorial Institute in the Summer of 1934. Just as she’s adjusting to the challenges of a superior education, tragic events change the trajectory of her life and rip her away from her best friend, my white character, Maggie. 

I couldn’t write a novel with Black characters in Burlington, NC, and not write about the amazing Charlotte Hawkins Brown and her PMI. I’m so glad I got to share her with you and if you ever find yourself in Sedalia, NC, make sure to stop by and give her a salute!