Charlotte Hawkins Brown and Clarissa M. Scott Delany
Week of April 2, 2001

During the decade of the 1920's there was unprecedented cultural, intellectual, political and social activity in the nation's African-American community. This movement, known at the time as the "New Negro Movement" and later as the "Harlem Renaissance" was, as the name implies, centered in the Harlem region of New York City, but extended throughout the population centers of the East Coast, including Washington, D.C. and Boston. This week we celebrate Wellesley alumnae of this period.

Charlotte Hawkins Brown was born in North Carolina in 1883 to former slaves. In 1889 her family moved to Boston and Charlotte attended school in Cambridge, graduating from Cambridge English High and Latin School. While in high school Charlotte met Alice Freeman Palmer, former President of Wellesley College. Legend has it that Palmer encountered Hawkins on a Boston street corner where Hawkins was standing and reading Vergil. Whether or not that is true, or just a charming anecdote, it is clear that Hawkins became Palmer's protégé. Palmer provided financial support for Hawkins to attend the Massachusetts State Normal School in Salem to prepare to become a teacher.

In 1901 Charlotte Hawkins left the normal school early and began teaching in a missionary school, the Bethany Institute, in her home state of North Carolina. As was the fate of many missionary schools, the Bethany Institute was forced to close the following year due to financial problems. In that same year, with assistance from Alice Freeman Palmer, Charlotte Hawkins established the Alice Freeman Palmer Institute, located in Sedalia North Carolina. She led the school, which included instruction from elementary through junior college levels, until the mid-1950's.

Charlotte Hawkins Brown pursued own her higher education at a number of institutions including Simmons College and Temple University. During the 1927-28 academic year she was a "special student" at Wellesley. This status meant that she was free to choose any courses she wished, unconstrained by degreee requirements. In 1944 she was elected as an honorary member of the Wellesley College Alumnae Association.

As an essayist, short-story writer, and lecturer, Charlotte Hawkins Brown was a strong anti-segregationist and advocate for African-American cultural pride and identity. In her book Harlem Renaissance and Beyond: Literary Biographies of One Hundred Black Women Writers, 1900-1945 (edited with Ruth Randolph, Harvard University Press, 1997) Wellesley College Professor of Spanish Lorraine Roses reports "... And once, decades before the sit-ins of the civil rights movement, she deliberately entered a coffeeshop in North Carolina and told the waiter 'I am a black American, and I want a cup of coffee'. She was served." A 1997 History Masters Thesis by Lydia Charles Hoffman (University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill) entitled Minding and Marketing Manners in the Jim Crow South: Dr. Charlotte Hawkins Brown and the Alice Freeman Palmer Memorial Institute presents a detailed analysis of her work with the Institute and of her writings.

Charlotte Hawkins Brown died in 1961. In 1987 North Carolina declared the Palmer Institute a state historic site, the first in the state to celebrate the life and work of an African American.

Clarissa M. Scott Delany ('23) grew up in Tuskeegee, Alabama, where her father was an administrator at the Tuskeegee Institute and a biographer of Booker T. Washington. While at Wellesley she became immersed in the spirit of the Harlem Renaissance, participating in Literary Guild meetings in Boston. She was an active student, a varsity athlete and a very talented singer and pianist.

After graduating Phi Beta Kappa in 1923, Clarissa Scott spent a year touring Europe. She later wrote of her experiences during that year in Opportunity; A Journal of Negro Life. On her return to the U.S. she accepted a teaching position at Dunbar High School in Washington, DC, and began her brief publishing career. She published four poems, and her work was praised by W.E.B. DuBois, Angelina Weld Grimke (who dedicated one of her own poems to Delany) and others. Lorraine Roses says "...The only four poems she published are somewhat mysterious; they do not refer to specific obstacles she faced as a black woman. Rather her verses are charged with a melancholy tone that attempts to embrace the hope of healing for a troubled soul."

When she was installed as President of Spellman College, Johnetta Cole quoted one of Clarissa Scott's poems in her inaugural speech.

Clarissa Scott married Hubert Delany in the fall of 1926. Less than a year later she died of "kidney disease", probably brought on by a strep infection.

In Harlem Renaissance and Beyond: Literary Biographies of One Hundred Black Women Writers, 1900-1945, Lori Roses provides more extensive biographies of Charlotte Hawkins Brown and Clarissa Scott Delany, as well as of two other Wellesley alumnae of the era Ethel Caution-Davis ('12), an educator, poet and short-story writer (1880-1981), and Brenda Ray Moryck (Francke) ('16), writer, educator and lecturer. Writings by Clarissa Scott Delany, Ethel Caution-Davis and Brenda Ray Moryck (Francke) are included in Harlem's Glory: Black Women Writing, 1900-1950, edited by Lorraine Roses and Ruth E. Randolph (Harvard University Press, 1996).

Ethel Caution-Davis

Brenda Ray Moryck

Written by Flick Coleman