Kate B. Brown Papers

Katherine B. Brown (1879-1939) was a member of the original faculty of the Mississippi Normal College (U.S.M.) in 1912. She was born and received her elementary, high school, and undergraduate education in Iuka, Mississippi. Having received a Bachelor's degree from the Iuka Normal Institute, Miss. Brown began her teaching career in rural schools, high schools (such as the Blue Mountain Academy and Mississippi Heights Academy), and served as the principal of Moss Point High School.

At the age of thirty-two, Miss Brown accepted the position of instructor of history and latin at the Mississippi Normal College. She maintained this position for seven years, also serving as director of the World War I Memorial Fund (1920-21), organizing the first International Relations Club in Mississippi at the College (1922), and representing Mississippi at the Pan-American Conference for Women in Baltimore and New York (1922). In 1924, Kate Brown received a Master of the Arts degree in history from Columbia University and was named chairperson of the Department of History at State Teachers College (formerly Mississippi Normal College).

In 1926, she was elected president of the Mississippi Education Association. In the same year, she was selected as a delegate for the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, which was a group of fifty professors of law and international relations sent to travel and study in Europe at the League of Nations and World Court.

Miss Brown remained as head of the History Department at State Teachers College until 1929. At that time she and many other faculty members were dismissed from the College as a result of political upheaval in the state government. Miss Brown later accepted a position assisting Dr. Robert Kerner of the History Department at the University of California, Berkeley (1932). She returned to Hattiesburg and rejoined the faculty of State Teachers College in 1936, where she remained as a professor of history until her death, December 7, 1939.