“Here’s a maid from sunny Baltimore. From the way she reads Latin we think they must speak it down there… She expects to enter U.V.M. next year. We know she’ll make good.” So reads the St. Johnsbury Academy yearbook entry for Edna Hall Brown, who spent a year at the preparatory school in Vermont’s “Northeast Kingdom” before enrolling at UVM in 1926. Brown, the first-known Black woman to graduate from UVM, did, indeed, make good.

On a trip home for the holidays in 1928, Brown was “presented” alongside ten other debutantes at the annual Half Century Club ball. In a formal photo from that evening, she stands with quiet poise at the back of the group. Brown would later become a high school teacher, and photos in yearbooks show her sitting straight-backed at her desk with a reserved smile. These representations make sense to Olga Ellis, a distant cousin and fellow career educator who lived around the corner from Brown in Baltimore. “Edna was very kind, very bright, but very demure—a lot like Agatha Christie’s Ms. Marple,” Ellis says. Other friends and family members remembered Brown for her integrity, wit, generosity, and devotion to those close to her.

Brown enjoyed traveling and spent the summer after graduating from UVM abroad with her mother. She also loved to garden, read, do crossword puzzles, and play pinochle and bridge (as evidenced in her UVM yearbook entry, above).

After capping her standout academic career at UVM with a Bachelor of Science degree, Brown went on to earn a master’s from the Teachers College at Columbia University in 1932. From there, she returned to her native Baltimore and taught the sciences—especially mathematics and physics—in the public school system until she retired as head of the science department at Dunbar Senior High School in 1970. As a teacher, she remained a rigorous student herself, pursuing additional post-graduate study at Morgan State University, Loyola University Maryland, and Johns Hopkins University.

Brown’s choice to return to Baltimore as a teacher does not surprise Jewell Debnam, PhD, assistant professor of history at Morgan State and an expert on Black women in twentieth-century America. “Most Black women who pursued higher education in the first half of the twentieth century would have done so with the knowledge that teaching was one of the few professional careers that would be open to them,” Debnam says. “Moreover, at the time, it was instilled in many members of the rising Black elite—promoted by intellectuals like Mary Church Terrell and W. E. B. Du Bois—that they had an obligation to return to their communities after college to teach, to help pull people up.” The Baltimore City Public Schools were not desegregated until 1956, and even after that, change was slow. Brown would have spent her entire career educating almost exclusively Black students. Her belief in the power of education for students of color would manifest itself again later in a powerful way.

Teaching was not the only way that Brown invested herself in her community. She was active in the historic Madison Avenue Presbyterian Church and a dedicated member of the DuBois Circle for 62 years. The DuBois Circle was founded in Baltimore in 1906 as a women’s auxiliary to work alongside DuBois and the members of the local branch of the Niagara Movement in their fight to address the social, political, and economic injustices faced by Black Americans. Over the years, these women led the fight for racial equality and social justice for the Black community in Jim Crow Baltimore. Brown and her compatriots placed themselves in the forefront of the battle to strengthen the education system, secure the right to vote for men and women, improve housing conditions, and promote equality. The group also engaged in “serious consideration” of literature and cultural subjects, including hosting Black luminaries like Langston Hughes and others. Brown held many positions in the DuBois Circle over the years, including serving as its president from 1971-1975. According to Beverly Carter, Esq., the DuBois Circle’s archivist and historian, “Edna Hall Brown is a great example of the African American women who used their knowledge and resources to lead the fight against the racial, social, and political injustices faced by African Americans within their communities.” Brown’s activism and commitment to delivering quality education to her community no doubt had a great deal to do with her remarkable family, which was a pillar of Black society in Baltimore for generations. Her maternal great-grandfather was a successful farmer who had owned large tracts of land outside the city. His son Dr. Reverdy Hall, Brown’s grandfather, was a well-known physician and a civil rights activist in Baltimore in the later nineteenth century. Dr. Hall, an early graduate of Howard University Medical School, was a firm believer in the importance of education for Black Americans. In the 1870s and 1880s he fought for the appointment of Black teachers to teach in Black schools. One of those early teachers was Brown’s namesake, her mother’s sister Edna Jeannette, who had passed away a few years before Brown was born. Brown’s father, for his part, was a pioneering Harvard-educated dentist who served the local community for 45 years and was active in numerous civic causes. Upon her death in 2000, Brown, like her forebears, passed some of the family’s hard-earned wealth to relatives. But she also did something new: she left a large portion of her estate to help minority students go to college. Half of those resources went to the United Negro College Fund, and half came to the University of Vermont, “to be used for their scholarship fund for minority students.” Recognizing the ongoing need for such support, the University used the gift to create the permanent Edna Hall Brown Scholarship Fund. Now Brown’s commitment to education and intellectual life, to empowering students of color and strengthening communities, will live on forever through the UVM students that her fund supports. It is a powerful and fitting legacy for this unassuming trailblazer.