[2] She started her career by teaching at a country school in South Carolina and, simultaneously, a class of older people.

Resigning due to ill health, she then traveled in the interest of Wilberforce University on a lecture tour.

Though elected as an instructor in elocution and literature at Wilberforce University, she declined the offer to accept a position at Tuskegee Institute.

In 1886, she graduated from Chautauqua, later receiving the degree of Master of Science from her alma mater, Wilberforce University, being the first woman to do so.

Her biography, Hallie Quinn Brown, Black Woman Elocutionist, was published by Annjennette Sophie McFarlin in 1975.

They got cotton seed, returned, mixed it with earth, which formed a plastic mortar, and with her own hands, she pasted up the holes.

She was persuaded to travel for her alma mater, Wilberforce, and started on a lecturing tour, concluding at Hampton School, Virginia.

After taking a course in elocution at this place, she traveled again, having much greater success, and received favorable criticism from the press.

[11] She was dean of Allen University in Columbia, South Carolina, from 1885 to 1887 and principal of Tuskegee Institute in Alabama during 1892–93 under Booker T.

The correspondent wrote: Our representative found Miss Brown eager to lay before the public the case of the American negro, whose troubles are far from having been ended by the mere process of emancipation….

Miss Brown had some striking faces to narrate of the enmity of the white population towards their black brethren.

"I have travelled and conversed with educated people of the well-to-do class, who the moment they discovered that I had a drop or two of negro blood in me, got out of the way, looking as though they could have kicked themselves for having even unwittingly fallen into such company."

And in the rougher districts of the South, a negro who did so far forget himself as to travel in any other compartment would speedily be hauled out and subjected to mob violence.

Miss Brown mentioned that on several occasions, while travelling in the Southern States, she had been warned to change the seat she occupied in the train, or to leave it altogether.... She also described the convict lease system: Another wicked practice is the exploiting of negro prison labour.

You have young negro boys and girls, convicted of trifling offences, which in Britain would be dealt with in a reformatory, sent to the workhouse.

She spoke at the Republican National Convention in 1924 and later directed campaign work among African-American women for President Calvin Coolidge.