Induction Category:
Reformers
Inducted:
2020
Throughout her life, Sarah Lee Brown Fleming was a tireless advocate for social, political and educational opportunities for African-American women.
Born into poverty in Charlestown, South Carolina in 1876, Fleming was raised in Brooklyn, New York. As a child, she had aspirations to become a schoolteacher but her father believed that her only employment prospects lay in domestic work. She challenged him and went on to become the first Black teacher in the Brooklyn public school system. In 1902, she married Richard Stedman Fleming, an immigrant from St. Kitts, and in 1910 they moved to New Haven, Connecticut where he would become the first African-American dentist in the state. They had two children, a son and a daughter.
The Flemings soon became prominent figures in Black elite circles. Sarah combined her education background with a devotion to the African-American community in New Haven, particularly women and girls. Shortly after settling in New Haven, she joined the Twentieth Century Club, New Haven’s oldest and largest Black women’s club. Her involvement with clubs such as this brought her into contact with national African-American women leaders and suffragists such as educator Mary McLeod Bethune and activist Mary Church Terrell. Fleming, working within Black club circles, became a leading voice for women’s suffrage and civil rights herself.
In 1929, Fleming turned the Twentieth Century Club into New Haven’s Women’s Civic League and later organized a statewide effort to bring together disparate associations and leagues under the auspices of the National Association of Colored Women’s Clubs. In 1936 she founded the Phillis Wheatley Home for Girls, where she provided a small shelter for young Black women who came to New Haven in search of employment.
But community and civil rights activism weren’t Fleming’s only accomplishments. She was an artist as well, writing songs, skits, musicals, poetry and works of fiction as part of the Harlem Renaissance. Her best-known work is a novel titled Hope’s Highway, one of the first to be published by a Black woman in America. Released in 1918, the story concerns a young African-American man who is wrongly imprisoned and escapes from a southern chain gang. After his trial, he flees to England and to Oxford University. He eventually returned to the South to successfully rebuild an educational institution for African-Americans. As part of its storyline, Hope’s Highway made a strong case for the cause of suffrage in England, and by extension, the cause for suffrage in the United States. Fleming’s other best-known work is a collection of poetry, “Clouds and Sunshine.” Throughout her works she emphasized themes of racial uplift, the necessity of integration, and the importance of education and women’s suffrage.
Fleming continued to be politically active in her later years, becoming the first African-American woman to earn the distinction of Connecticut’s Mother of the Year in 1952. In 1955, she testified in front of Congress, outlining her commitment to civil rights, equal education and the promotion of social welfare for women and children.
Fleming died in New Haven in 1963, five days before her 87th birthday.
