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Hallie Quinn Brown

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Hallie Quinn Brown
BornHallie Quinn Brown
(1850-03-10)March 10, 1850
Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, U.S.
DiedSeptember 16, 1950(1950-09-16) (aged 100)
Wilberforce, Ohio, U.S.
Resting placeMassies Creek Cemetery, Cedarville, Ohio
Occupationeducator, writer, activist
LanguageEnglish
Alma materWilberforce University

Hallie Quinn Brown (March 10, 1850 – September 16, 1950)[A] was an American educator, writer and activist.[1] Originally of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, she moved with her parents (who had been enslaved) while quite young to a farm near Chatham, Canada, in 1864 and then to Ohio in 1870. In 1868, she began a course of study in Wilberforce University, Ohio, from which she graduated in 1873 with the degree of Bachelor of Science.[2]

She started her career by teaching at a country school in South Carolina and at the same time, a class of older people.[3] After this, she went to Mississippi, where she again had charge of a school.[3] She became employed as a teacher at Yazoo City, Mississippi, before securing a position as teacher in Dayton, Ohio. Resigning due to ill health, she then traveled in the interest of Wilberforce University on a lecture tour, and was particularly welcomed at Hampton Normal School (now Hampton University) in Virginia. Though elected as instructor in elocution and literature at Wilberforce University, she declined the offer in order to accept a position at Tuskegee Institute. In 1886, she graduated from Chautauqua, and in 1887 received the degree of Master of Science from her alma mater, Wilberforce University, being the first woman to do so.[4]

The Hallie Q. Brown Community Center in Saint Paul, Minnesota, established in 1929, was established to serve the community. It was named to commemorate the life of Hallie Quinn Brown. The library at Central State University in Wilberforce, Ohio is named the Hallie Q. Brown Memorial Library in her honor.[5]: 305 

Biography

Brown was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, one of six children.[2][3] Her parents, Frances Jane Scroggins and Thomas Arthur Brown, were freed slaves.[3] Her brother, Jeremiah, became a politician in Ohio.[6]

At a young age, Brown's parents and siblings migrated to Ontario, Canada. She attended Wilberforce University and earned her Bachelor of Science degree in 1873. There were a total of six people in her class, and she graduated salutatorian.[2][7] One of her classmates was Mary E. Ashe Lee, the wife of Rev. B. F. Lee, D.D., ex-President of Wilberforce.[8]

She was a prominent member of the African Methodist Episcopal Church (AME); also a member of the "King's Daughters," "Human Rights League," and the "Isabella Association."[9] Brown died on September 16, 1949, in Wilberforce, Ohio. Her biography, Hallie Quinn Brown, Black Woman Elocutionist, 1845(?)–1949, was published by Annjennette Sophie in 1975.[10]

Career and service

Educator

Cabinet card of Hallie Quinn Brown

Her first school was on a plantation in South Carolina,[3] where she endured the rough life as best she could, and taught a large number of children from neighboring plantations. She also taught a class of aged people, who were then able to read the Bible. She next took charge of a school on Sonora Plantation, in Mississippi,[3] the people much hindered by the use of tobacco and whisky. Her plantation school had no windows, but it was well ventilated and the rain beat in fiercely. Not being successful in getting the authorities to fix the building, she secured the willing service of two of her larger students. She mounted one mule, and the two boys another, and thus they rode to the gin mill. They got cotton seed, returned, mixed it with earth, which formed a plastic mortar, and with her own hands she pasted up the holes.[8]

Her fame as instructor spread and her services were secured as teacher at Yazoo City. On account of the unsettled state of affairs in 1874–5, she was compelled to return North. Brown then taught in Dayton, Ohio, for four years. Owing to ill health, she gave up teaching. She was persuaded to travel for her alma mater, Wilberforce, and started on a lecturing tour, concluding at Hampton School, Virginia. After taking a course in elocution at this place, she traveled again, having much greater success, and received favorable criticism from the press.[11]

She was dean of Allen University in Columbia, South Carolina, from 1885 to 1887 and principal of Tuskegee Institute in Alabama during 1892–93 under Booker T. Washington.[2][3] She became a professor at Wilberforce in 1893, and was a frequent lecturer on African American issues and the temperance movement, speaking at the international Woman's Christian Temperance Union conference in London in 1895 and representing the United States at the International Congress of Women in London in 1899. She also performed in front of Queen Victoria in 1897.[12]

In 1896, she held a meeting in Edinburgh and gave an interview with a correspondent of The Edinburgh Evening News. The correspondent wrote:

Our representative found Miss Brown eager to lay before the public the case of the American negro, whose troubles are far from having been ended by the mere process of emancipation…. Miss Brown had some striking faces to narrate of the enmity of the white population towards their black brethren. The feeling, of course, is most bitter in the Southern States – the old slave centres. Even in the North, however, it manifests itself. "I have travelled and conversed with educated people of the well-to-do class, who the moment they discovered that I had a drop or two of negro blood in me, got out of the way, looking as though they could have kicked themselves for having even unwittingly fallen into such company." In many districts, a negro who went into a white man’s church and took a seat there would promptly be invited out, and, if he did not go, would be hustled out by the police… Again, on their railways, the negro must travel in one miserable car only, the "Jim Crow car," in which all people of colour, refined or not, are expected to travel. They may pay first-class fare – it is all the same. And in the rougher districts of the South, a negro who did so far forget himself as to travel in any other compartment would speedily be hauled out and subjected to mob violence. A negro daren't as much as look at a white woman. On the other hand, there is no prescription against the meanest of the white travellers entering the "Jim Crow" compartment, and molesting or insulting negro girls and women travelling unprotected there. Miss Brown mentioned that on several occasions, while travelling in the Southern States, she had been warned to change the seat she occupied in the train, or to leave it altogether....

She also described the convict lease system:

Another wicked practice is the exploiting of negro prison labour. You have young negro boys and girls, convicted of trifling offences, which in Britain would be dealt with in a reformatory, sent to the workhouse. That is a very different institution to the workhouse of this country. It is really a jail. These young offenders are taken out to work by day at building, or road making, or so forth, and locked up again at night. "I have seen myself," Miss Brown said, "girls of 12 chained to hardened criminals, going out to break stones on the roads." This system, she went on to explain, cuts in two ways. In the first place, it affords a ready means of disfranchising the negro. In the second place, it gives the ruling class a supply of cheap convict labour… Then there is what is called the "convict lease system" – the hiring out of prison labour....[13]

Elocutionist

Hallie Brown, giving a speech at Poro College in 1920.[14]

For several years she traveled with "The Wilberforce Grand Concert Company", an organization for the benefit of Wilberforce College. She read before hundreds of audiences, and tens of thousands of people. She possessed a magnetic voice, seeming to have perfect control of the muscles of the throat, and could vary her voice as successfully. As a public reader, Brown enthused her audiences. In her humorous selections, she often caused "wave after wave" of laughter; in her pathetic pieces, she often moved her audience to tears.[11]

Reformer and activist

In 1889, Brown delivered remarks on her belief in the abilities of Black women and the need for women teachers to help educate "this great nation of women” at a conference of the AME Church. In these remarks she proposed husbands support the education of their wives, and the need for equality of educational access for women. This is considered her debut as women's rights advocate, which included the right to vote.[15]

In 1893, Brown presented a paper at the World's Congress of Representative Women in Chicago. In addition to Brown, four more African American women presented at the conference: Anna Julia Cooper, Fannie Barrier Williams, Fanny Jackson Coppin, and Sarah Jane Woodson Early.[16]

Brown was a founder of the Colored Woman's League of Washington, D.C., which in 1896 merged into the National Association of Colored Women.[2] She was president of the Ohio State Federation of Colored Women's Clubs from 1905 until 1912, and of the National Association of Colored Women from 1920 until 1924. She spoke at the Republican National Convention in 1924 and later directed campaign work among African-American women for President Calvin Coolidge.[2] Brown was inducted as an honorary member of Delta Sigma Theta.[when?]

Authored works

  • Bits and Odds: A Choice Selection of Recitations (1880)
  • First Lessons in Public Speaking (1920)
  • Tales My Father Told Me, and Other Stories (1925)[17]
  • Homespun Heroines and Other Women of Distinction, with introduction by Josephine Turpin Washington (1926)
    • Includes short biographies of African American women[18]

Notes

  1. ^
    Some sources give her birth year as 1850.

References

  1. ^ Kates, Susan (1997). "The Embodied Rhetoric of Hallie Quinn Brown". College English. 59 (1): 59–71. doi:10.2307/378798. JSTOR 378798.
  2. ^ a b c d e f Ohles 1978, p. 185.
  3. ^ a b c d e f g Donawerth 2002, p. 172.
  4. ^ Scruggs 1893, pp. 18–19.
  5. ^ Wesley, Charles H (1971). "Brown, Hallie Quinn". In James, Edward T.; James, Janet Wilson; Boyer, Paul S. (eds.). Notable American Women, 1607–1950. Vol. III. Cambridge, Massachusetts: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press. p. 253-254. ISBN 0674627342. {{cite book}}: |work= ignored (help)
  6. ^ Simmons & Turner 1887, pp. 113–17.
  7. ^ Givens, Sonja M Brown; Jackson II, Ronald L (2006), "Hallie Quinn Brown (1850-1949)", Black Pioneers in Communication Research, 2455 Teller Road, Thousand Oaks California 91320 United States: SAGE Publications, Inc., pp. 64–84, doi:10.4135/9781452225692.n1, retrieved 2023-08-26{{citation}}: CS1 maint: location (link)
  8. ^ a b Haley & Washington 1895, p. 581.
  9. ^ Scruggs 1893, p. 18.
  10. ^ McFarlin 1975, p. 1.
  11. ^ a b Haley & Washington 1895, p. 583.
  12. ^ Henry Louis Gates Jr and Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, African American Lives (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004),107–109; Jane Donawerth (ed), Rhetorical Theory by Women Before 1900: An Anthology (New York: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc, 2002), 172–194; Jane Donawerth, Conversational Rhetoric: The Rise and Fall of a Women’s Tradition 1600–1900 (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2012), 119–125; Annejennette S. McFarlin, "Hallie Quinn Brown: Black Woman Elocutionist" (PhD. Diss., Washington State University, 1975); Susan Kates, "The Embodied Rhetoric of Hallie Quinn Brown", College English,(1997), 59–71; Susan Kates, Activist Rhetorics and American Higher Education 1885–1937 (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2001), 53–74; and Claire Strom, "Hallie Quinn Brown" in American National Biography, ed. John A. Garraty and Mark C. Carnes (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999).
  13. ^ The Edinburgh Evening News, Tuesday January 14, 1896, p. 4.
  14. ^ Taylor, Julius F. "The Broad Ax". Illinois Digital Newspaper Collections. Retrieved June 18, 2015.
  15. ^ "Suffragist Hallie Quinn Brown 'Knew the Power of Black Women'". The Washington Informer. 2019-11-06. Retrieved 2022-04-04.
  16. ^ Hairston 2013, p. 121.
  17. ^ Brown, Thomas A.., Brown, Hallie Quinn. Tales My Father Told, and Other Stories. United States: Homewood Cottage, 1925.
  18. ^ Watson, Warren. "LibGuides: History of Wilberforce University: Hallie Brown". wilberforcepayne.libguides.com. Retrieved 2023-08-26.

Attribution

  • Public Domain This article incorporates text from this source, which is in the public domain: Haley, James T; Washington, Booker T (1895). "Miss Hallie Q. Brown by F. S. Delany". Afro-American Encyclopaedia: Or, the Thoughts, Doings, and Sayings of the Race, Embracing Addresses, Lectures, Biographical Sketches, Sermons, Poems, Names of Universities, Colleges, Seminaries, Newspapers, Books, and a History of the Denominations, Giving the Numerical Strength of Each. In Fact, it Teaches Every Subject of Interest to the Colored People, as Discussed by More Than One Hundred of Their Wisest and Best Men and Women (Public domain ed.). Haley & Florida.
  • Public Domain This article incorporates text from this source, which is in the public domain: Scruggs, Lawson Andrew (1893). Women of Distinction: Remarkable in Works and Invincible in Character. L. A. Scruggs.
  • Public Domain This article incorporates text from this source, which is in the public domain: Simmons, William J.; Turner, Henry McNeal (1887). Men of Mark: Eminent, Progressive and Rising (Public domain ed.). G. M. Rewell & Company. ISBN 9781468096811.

Bibliography

Further reading

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