The Hallie Q. Brown Community House had its beginnings in 1908 when African American members of the Odd Fellows and Masons fraternal lodges purchased six lots on Aurora Street between Kent and Mackubin located within St. Paul's largely African American Rondo neighborhood. In 1914 the Union Hall Association was organized and it constructed a neighborhood center on one of the lots. The St. Paul Urban League and the YWCA contributed funds and other support during 1923-1929. The YWCA was forced to withdraw its funding in 1929 and a new interracial committee was formed to carry on the work. I. Myrtle Carden of Pittsburgh was hired as the director, a position she held until 1949, and the center was named for Civil Rights and women's suffrage activist Hallie Q. Brown (ca. 1845-1949). During Carden's tenure, Hallie Q. Brown became the second largest neighborhood center in St. Paul. Subsequent directors were Alice Sims Onque (1949-1965), Henry R. Thomas (1965-1978), Fred B. Williams (1978- ), and Richard M. Mangram. During the 1970s the organization's name was changed to the Hallie Q. Brown Community Center.
The organization began as a largely cultural center to serve the unmet needs of the Black community in the city, as well as to create better relationships with the white community. Over the years the center grew to provide educational, social, cultural, and human services activities for community residents of all ages. In the latter 1970s it constructed a new, larger facility-the Martin Luther King Center-on Kent Street to accommodate its wide-ranging programs.
The records include miscellaneous administrative correspondence; minutes of the board, the steering committee, and many of the program units that operated under the aegis of the house; photographs, clippings, flyers, and other publicity materials; and some financial miscellany. The records give some insights into the history of the most significant and long-standing local organization serving St. Paul's African American community.
These records are organized into the following three sections:
A number of monographs are in the Minnesota Historical Society book collection. Buttons issued by the center are in the Minnesota Historical Society museum collections.
This collection is indexed under the following headings in the catalog of the Minnesota Historical Society. Researchers desiring materials about related topics, persons or places should
Accession number: 8479; 9678; 9923; 11,710; 11,924; 12,253; 12,380
Processed by: Kathryn M. Johnson, December 1996
PALS number: 09-00320357
The annual meeting program booklet often incorporates the annual report, and vice versa, so they are interfiled chronologically.
Includes scattered agendas, minutes, rosters, reports, and motions.
The staff minutes are, in general, substantive and give a fairly good idea of the routine business of running the Hallie Q. Brown House program and facilities.
The council was apparently made up of representatives of the various clubs and other sub-organizations that operated under the aegis of Hallie Q. Brown or used its facilities. It shared information and set rules for operating within the House.
The correspondence is very miscellaneous in character. Includes several pieces from Dr. Hallie Q. Brown during the 1940s.
The Golden Agers was a senior citizen social group that met at the Hallie Q. Brown House. These files are mostly not traditional minutes, but are detailed reports on their activities kept by an observer, who noted and commented on the interpersonal relations that occurred within the group.
The council was formed in April 1941 by women in the Rondo neighborhood to formalize a set of activities that had theretofore occurred informally: to improve civic, social, and educational conditions in the community and to conduct an annual women's conference. The council and its subunits met in the Hallie Q. Brown House. The council formed a number of committees-Ways and Means, Hobbies and Exhibits, Program, Steering, Membership, and Recreation and Publicity-all coordinated by a steering committee. The council worked with PTAs, the school district, city council, and other groups to help shape the neighborhood, as well as planning a variety of cultural and social activities. Minutes are mostly from whole council and from steering committee. Materials from 1952-1953 include process study reports conducted by an outside agency analyzing the council's functioning and its interpersonal transactions, presumably to explain why its vitality had dropped off notably in the 1950s.
Broadcast script for a live radio program on the subject of racial and ethnic discrimination broadcast on WCCO-Radio, Minneapolis, June 25-July 30, 1947. The programs were sponsored by the National Conference of Christians and Jews, Minneapolis Community Self Survey, Urban League, St. Paul Council on Human Relations, Minneapolis Jewish Council, Minneapolis Mayor's Council on Human Relations, and the Governor's Interracial Commission.
The black and white prints are largely snapshots of people and activities at the Hallie Q. Brown House, most of them unidentified.