Landscape Architecture Project Honoring Esteemed Educator Brown Unveiled to Alumni

A two-year project by N.C. A&T’s landscape architecture students to commemorate renowned civil rights activist and educator Charlotte Hawkins Brown was unveiled recently before a group of friends, students and alumni of the school she founded.

In a ceremony for alumni of the historic Palmer Memorial Institute in Sedalia, N.C., renovations to Brown’s gravesite, on the grounds of what is now the Charlotte Hawkins Brown Museum and State Historic Site, were shown to the group for the first time during a memorial service for recently passed former Palmer students on August 24. The project was launched in Spring 2022 by the landscape architecture program, in the College of Agriculture and Environmental Sciences.

Steve Cancian, assistant professor in the landscape architecture program, called the restoration a “coming together” of many entities to pay tribute to Brown’s memory.

The N.C. A&T landscape architecture program students’ renovations to Charlotte Hawkins Brown’s gravesite include plantings and stonework

“This was a profound experience for our students to learn how to design with great responsibility,” said Cancian, presenting at the ceremony. “They became students of Charlotte Hawkins Brown, like many of you were. I think, in the end, the Palmer Institute has four more alumni: Ivan, Chavious, Octavia, and Silas.”

Born in Henderson in 1883, Brown founded the Palmer Memorial Institute in 1902 as a day and boarding school for African American students. Named after Alice Freeman Palmer, the Massachusetts Board of Education member who paid for Brown’s schooling expenses, the institute originated in a blacksmith’s cabin before Brown raised the money to buy 200 acres and build two new buildings for the campus. By 1970, more than 1,000 Black students had attended the school, one of the few of its kind in the state that offered college preparatory programs to minorities. In 1987, the campus, now a memorial to Brown’s legacy, officially opened as a state historic site.

H.M. “Mickey” Michaux Jr., civil rights activist and the longest-serving member of North Carolina’s General Assembly, attended Palmer from 1943-1948 during Brown’s tenure and recalled her impact on his academic and political career.

“Dr. Brown was the first person to ever tell me outside of my family that I was somebody, that irrespective of how people looked at you, to remember that you have your own sight, your own body, your own breath, your own thinking, and you have the capability of doing whatever you wanted to do,” said Michaux. “It’s not difficult for me to say that whatever I might have done, whatever I might have accomplished, I can lay at the feet of this institution. What my folks taught me had been embellished by what Dr. Brown, that little Black woman, instilled in me.”

From 2022 into late 2023, senior landscape architecture majors – Ivan Vazquez, Octavia Coleman, Chavious Burns, and Silas Lindsey – worked with faculty on the gravesite restoration effort, planting more than 200 trees, shrubs and perennials and building a stone wall around Brown’s gravestone. As part of the design, they placed commemorative plaques displaying quotes by Brown throughout her academic career on the concrete leading up to the restored gravesite. Funding for the project came from the General Federation of Women’s Clubs, which raised $14,000 to assist the program in it’s design-build efforts, Cancian said.

“Back almost two years, when we first started this project, it looked like a sad piece of concrete going into a dirt pile. Now, we have beautiful, thoughtful planting all around,” Vazquez said. “Kudos to the maintenance team for keeping it up, and to anybody else who’s been keeping it true and wonderful.”

More than a dozen Palmer Institute alumni gathered at Brown’s gravesite on Aug. 24 as part of a three-day, biannual gathering of the former students. They commented on the quality of the students’ work.

“We are very grateful for North Carolina A&T for their involvement and work at the Charlotte Hawkins Brown Memorial Site,” said LaShene C. Lowe, Class of 1970. “A&T stays in touch with [the Museum] and I hope that continues with projects and different things to help the campus.”

“It’s fabulous,” said Jaqueline Eaton, Class of 1971. “It means that there’s hope for this entire campus.”

“The site is as clean and as neat as you’d want,” said Michaux, who helped secure a special bill, passed in 1983 by the N.C. General Assembly, that paved the way for the Brown memorial to become the state’s first African American state historic site. “There’s work still to be done on this campus, but if you look, it’s still just as pretty as when I attended.”