Abstract
Dr. Charlotte Hawkins Brown, a black educator and activist, dedicated her career to the advancement of the African American race in the first half of the twentieth century. As a child, Brown expressed an interest in education and by the age of twenty, she had established the Palmer Memorial Institute, a school for African American children. As the “First Lady of Social Graces,” Brown devoted herself to her Christian faith, and her ideas of racial progress were centered on educating African Americans in liberal arts, European culture, and social etiquette. These Euro-American- centered values were shared with other middle-class African Americans who believed that respectability was the key to successfully navigating an oppressive white society. In this essay, the black racial uplift strategy and the black public sphere of the early twentieth century are examined through a case study of Charlotte Hawkins Brown, a leader who embodied the black middle-class racial uplift ideology.
How to Cite
White, Z., (2020) “Charlotte Hawkins Brown: How the “First Lady of Social Graces” Uplifted the African American Race”, Capstone, The UNC Asheville Journal of Undergraduate Scholarship 33(1).
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