Quick Facts
Biography
Hallie Quinn Brown (March 10, 1849 – September 16, 1949) was an African-American educator, writer and activist.
Biography
Brown was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, one of six children. Her parents, Frances Jane Scroggins and Thomas Arthur Brown, were freed slaves. She attended Wilberforce University in Ohio, gaining a Bachelor of Science degree. Her brother, Jeremiah, later became a politician in Ohio. Brown graduated from Wilberforce in 1873 and then taught in schools in Mississippi and South Carolina.
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.
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.
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.
Brown was a founder of the Colored Woman's League of Washington, D.C., which in 1894 merged into the National 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 President Calvin Coolidge. Brown was inducted as an honorary member of Delta Sigma Theta.
Published works
- Bits and Odds: A Choice Selection of Recitations (1880)
- First Lessons in Public Speaking (1920)
- Homespun Heroines and Other Women of Distinction, with introduction by Josephine Turpin Washington (1926)