An ongoing illustrative history study
This piece originally posted 2/18/2021
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"Talk not of the negro woman's incapacity, of her inferiority, until the centuries of her hideous servitude have been succeeded by centuries of education, culture, and refinement, by which she may rise to the fullness of the stature of her highest ideal."
Born to escaped slaves in 1850 (who had managed to flee to Toronto), Hallie Quinn Brown and her family later moved to Wilberforce, OH after the Civil War. She graduated from Wilberforce College in 1873 and held a number of teaching jobs, ultimately becoming Dean of Allen University in 1887, and then Dean of Women at the Tuskegee Institute in 1893. During these years she had developed a reputation as a compelling public speaker, both for womens' suffrage and for temperance advocacy. She represented the U.S. at a number of Temperance conferences in Europe --in 1899 she addressed the International Congress of Women in the United Kingdom, which included a face-to-face meeting with Queen Victoria.
Brown's oratory skills were more aggressively put to work, though, for the cause of civil rights. In 1896 she was one of the organizers of the Colored Women's League in Washington, D.C., which would later feed into the National Association of Colored Women (NACW). Brown herself served as President of the NACW from 1920 to 1924; in 1924 she also addressed the Republican National Convention in Cleveland, and campaigned for Calvin Coolidge.
Brown remained a Wilberforce resident her entire life. Between 1880 and 1920 she published a number of essays on civil rights and womens' suffrage, and even two books on public speaking; however her greatest accomplishment is likely her seminal work "Homespun Heroines and Other Women of Distinction," published in 1926 and eminently readable at https://docsouth.unc.edu/neh/brownhal/menu.html. The work, compiling stories and narratives from Brown and 28 other essayists, is ostensibly a series of profiles of 60 leading African American women from 1740 to 1900, but Brown's framing device of "school, church, and club" anchors all of the stories together and creates a fascinating historical perspective. (Warning: casual perusal can swiftly turn into a Deep Dive --remember to come up out of this rabbit-hole to eat and drink periodically.)
(And yes, I changed it up a little this time, artistically. Watercolors and ink combination, trying for that early daguerreotype effect. THANK YOU for pushing me, Jen!)
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