Hallie Quinn Brown

Hallie Quinn Brown was born on the tenth of March, about 1850, in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, the daughter of Thomas Arthur Brown and Frances Jane Scroggins, both of whom had known the bondage of slavery before winning their freedom. Her exact birth year is uncertain in the record — sources place it variously around 1845 or 1850 — a haziness that speaks to how carelessly a Black life was documented in that age, and how fiercely such lives had nonetheless to be remembered.

She entered Wilberforce University in Ohio and graduated in 1873, later becoming the first woman to earn a Master of Science there. After the Civil War she carried letters and learning into the plantation and public schools of Mississippi and South Carolina, teaching the newly freed. From 1893 she served for roughly three decades as professor of elocution at Wilberforce, and her voice made her one of the most celebrated elocutionists on two continents, drawing audiences across America and Europe.

Brown gave her platform to temperance, to the suffrage of women, and to the civil rights of her people. From 1920 to 1924 she served as president of the National Association of Colored Women, and she raised her voice against a proposed Confederate "mammy" monument that would have mocked enslaved women's dignity. Her books — among them Homespun Heroines and Other Women of Distinction — gathered and guarded the stories of Black women against forgetting.

She died on the sixteenth of September, 1949, in Wilberforce, Ohio. May the honored voice that lifted a people be heard across the generations.