Sedalia: Charlotte Hawkins Brown and the Finishing School That Changed Education
Near Greensboro, North Carolina
In nineteen oh one, an eighteen-year-old Black schoolteacher named Charlotte Hawkins Brown arrived in this rural Guilford County community near Greensboro with a mission to educate Black children who had almost no access to quality schooling. She started with a rundown blacksmith shed and a handful of students.
She named the institution she built the Alice Freeman Palmer Memorial Institute, honoring Alice Freeman Palmer, the former president of Wellesley College who had been her mentor. Over the next seven decades the school grew into one of the most prestigious preparatory academies available to Black students anywhere in the country, drawing enrollment from more than forty states and several foreign countries.
More than one thousand students passed through Palmer's program between its founding and its closure in nineteen seventy-one. The campus reopened in nineteen eighty-seven as the Charlotte Hawkins Brown Memorial State Historic Site. Brown herself is remembered as one of the most influential educators North Carolina ever produced.
