Palmer Memorial Institute

Palmer Memorial Institute in Sedalia, North Carolina, was founded in nineteen oh two by Charlotte Hawkins Brown, a young Black educator who had studied at the State Normal School in Salem, Massachusetts. Brown returned to Guilford County and started a school for Black children in an old blacksmith shop. She named it for a mentor, Alice Freeman Palmer, and spent fifty years building it into one of the most respected Black preparatory schools in the American South.

At its height, Palmer was a fully accredited college preparatory school. Charlotte Hawkins Brown was also a prominent voice in the civil rights movement decades before the movement's familiar era. The site is now a North Carolina State Historic Site.