Hallie Quinn Brown

Hallie Quinn Brown
Born	Hallie Quinn Brown March 15, 1845 or 1850 Pittsburgh,Pennsylvania, U.S.
Died	September 16, 1949 Wilberforce, Ohio,U.S.
Resting place	Massies Creek Cemetery,Cedarville, Ohio
Occupation	Educator, writer, activist
Citizenship	USA
Alma mater	Wilberforce University

Hallie Quinn Brown(March 15, 1845/1850 - September 16, 1949) was an African-American educator and activist.She moved with her parents (who were freed slaves) while quite young to a farm nearChatham, Ontario, Canada,in 1864 and then toOhioin 1870. In 1868, she began a course of study inWilberforce University,Ohio, from which she graduated in 1873 with the degree ofBachelor of Science.

She started her career by teaching at a country school inSouth Carolinaand at the same time, a class of older people.After this, she went toMississippi,where she again had charge of a school.She became employed as a teacher atYazoo City, Mississippi,before securing a position as teacher inDayton,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 (nowHampton University) inVirginia.Though elected as instructor inelocutionandliteratureat Wilberforce University, she declined the offer in order to accept a position atTuskegee Institute.In 1886, she graduated fromChautauqua,later receiving the degree ofMaster of Sciencefrom her alma mater, Wilberforce University, being the first woman to do so.

TheHallie Q. Brown Community CenterinSaint Paul, Minnesota,established in 1929, was established to serve the community. It was named to commemorate the life of Hallie Quinn Brown. ThelibraryatCentral State UniversityinWilberforce, Ohiois named the Hallie Q. Brown Memorial Library in her honor.

Biography

Brown was born in Pennsylvania, one of seven children. Her parents,Frances Jane Scrogginsand Thomas Arthur Brown, were freedslaves. Her brother,Jeremiah,became apoliticianin Ohio.At a young age, her parents and siblings migrated toOntario,Canada. She attended Wilberforce University and earned her Bachelor of Science degree in 1890. There were a total of six people in her class, and she graduatedsalutatorian.One of her classmates wasMary E. Ashe Lee,the wife ofRev. B. F. Lee, D.D.,ex-President of Wilberforce.

She was a prominent member of theAfrican Methodist Episcopal Church(AME); also a member of the "King's Daughters", "Human Rights League", and the "Isabella Association".

Brown died on September 16, 1949 inWilberforce, Ohio.Herbiography,Hallie Quinn Brown, Black Woman Elocutionist,waspublishedby Annjennette Sophie McFarlin in 1975.

Career and service

Educator

Cabinet card of Hallie Quinn Brown

Her first school was on aplantationin South Carolina,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 theBible.She next took charge of a school on Sonora Plantation, in Mississippi,the people much hindered by the use oftobaccoandwhisky.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 onemule,and the two boys another, and thus they rode to the gin mill. They gotcotton seed,returned, mixed it with earth, which formed a plastic mortar, and with her own hands she pasted up the holes.

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 inelocutionat this place, she traveled again, having much greater success, and received favorable criticism from the press.

She was dean ofAllen Universityin Columbia, South Carolina, from 1885 to 1887 and principal ofTuskegee Institutein Alabama during 1892–93 underBooker T. Washington.She became a professor at Wilberforce in 1893, and was a frequent lecturer onAfrican Americanissues and thetemperance movement,speaking at the internationalWoman's Christian Temperance Unionconference in London in 1895 and representing the United States at theInternational Congress of Womenin London in 1899. She also performed in front ofQueen Victoriain 1897.

In 1896, she held a meeting inEdinburghand gave an interview with a correspondent ofThe 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....

Elocutionist

Hallie Brown, giving a speech atPoro Collegein 1920.

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 themusclesof thethroat,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.

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 theAME 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.

In 1893, Brown presented a paper at theWorld's Congress of Representative Womenin Chicago. In addition to Brown, four more African American women presented at the conference:Anna Julia Cooper,Fannie Barrier Williams,Fanny Jackson Coppin,andSarah Jane Woodson Early.

Brown was a founder of the Colored Woman's League of Washington, D.C., which in 1896 merged into theNational Association of Colored Women.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 PresidentCalvin Coolidge.Brown was inducted as an honorary member ofDelta Sigma Theta.

Death

Brown died on September 16, 1949, in Wilberforce, Ohio, of coronary thrombosis. Two buildings are named in her honor: the Hallie Q. Brown Memorial Library in Wilberforce, Ohio, and our Community Center.

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)
• Homespun Heroines and Other Women of Distinction,with introduction byJosephine Turpin Washington(1926)
  • Includes short biographies of African American women

References

Attribution

• This article incorporates text from this source, which is in thepublic 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.
• This article incorporates text from this source, which is in thepublic domain:Scruggs, Lawson Andrew (1893).Women of Distinction: Remarkable in Works and Invincible in Character.L. A. Scruggs.
• This article incorporates text from this source, which is in thepublic domain:Simmons, William J.; Turner, Henry McNeal (1887).Men of Mark: Eminent, Progressive and Rising(Public domain ed.). G. M. Rewell & Company.ISBN9781468096811.

Bibliography

• Donawerth, Jane (2002).Rhetorical Theory by Women Before 1900: An Anthology.Rowman & Littlefield.ISBN978-0-7425-1717-2.
• Jane Donawerth,Conversational Rhetoric: The Rise and Fall of a Women’s Tradition 1600-1900(Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2012), 119–125
• Henry Louis Gates JrandEvelyn Brooks Higginbotham,African American Lives(New York: Oxford University Press, 2004), pp. 107–109
• Hairston, Eric Ashley (June 30, 2013).The Ebony Column: Classics, Civilization, and the African American Reclamation of the West.Univ. of Tennessee Press.ISBN978-1-57233-984-2.
• McFarlin, Annjennette Sophie (1975).Hallie Quinn Brown, Black Woman Elocutionist, 1845(?)-1949.Washington State University.
• Susan Kates, “The Embodied Rhetoric of Hallie Quinn Brown”,College English,(1997), pp. 59–71
• Susan Kates,Activist Rhetorics and American Higher Education 1885–1937(Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2001), pp. 53–74
• Ohles, John F. (1978).Biographical Dictionary of American Educators.Greenwood Publishing Group.ISBN978-0-313-04012-2.
• Claire Strom, "Hallie Quinn Brown" inAmerican National Biography,ed. John A. Garraty and Mark C. Carnes (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999).
• Powell, Lisa (February 13, 2020)."Hallie Brown, daughter of former slaves, pursued education for all".Dayton Daily News.p. D5.Retrieved2022-04-29– via Newspapers.com.

External links

• Jackson, Errin (April 19, 2007)."Brown, Hallie Quinn (1850–1949)".BlackPast.org.RetrievedMarch 17,2010.
• Encyclopædia Britannica's Guide to Black History
• Homespun Heroines and Other Women of Distinction,Xenia, Ohio:Aldine Pub. Co., 1926.