Benjamin Griffith Brawley

[8] Brawley's education started in his home where his mother served as his teacher until his family moved to Nashville, Tennessee, where he was admitted into third grade.

During his time in Nashville, despite going to a normal school, Brawley's mother still read Bible stories and verses with him on Sundays.

[6] Brawley entered the Atlanta Baptist Seminary (Morehouse College), where he became aware of the educational discrepancies in the community, at the age of thirteen -- most of his older classmates did not know much about classical literature or languages, such as Greek and Latin, which he knew plenty about.

[8] During his time at Morehouse, Brawley not only excelled in his studies but he also assisted his classmates by revising their written assignments before they submitted them to their professors.

[6] Brawley graduated from The Atlanta Baptist Seminary with honors in 1901, and soon after, he launched his teaching career at Georgetown in a one-room school a few miles from Palatka, Florida where he cared for about fourteen children from first to eighth grade.

[6] In 1910, Brawley accepted an invitation to become a part of the faculty at Howard University in Washington, D.C., where he met a Jamaican lady from Kingston with the name Hilda Damaris Prowd who would later become his wife.

[8] A year later, he resigned from his position as a minister and returned to teaching because of incompatibility issues with the congregation's Christianity.