William Washington Browne
*William Washington Browne was born on this date in 1849. He was a Black teacher, minister, and businessman.
He was from Habersham County, Georgia, and was the son of Joseph Browne and Mariah Browne. His parents were Virginia slaves who met after being sold and transported to Georgia. Browne's original given name was Ben. When he was about eight years old, he was moved to a plantation near Memphis, Tennessee, then sold to a horse trader. After his sale, Browne adopted the given name William Washington. He escaped from slavery in 1862 after the United States Army occupied Memphis and served first on a Union gunboat and then in the infantry.
After being discharged in 1866, Browne attended school in Prairie du Chien, Wisconsin, before returning to the South in 1869 to teach. He met Mary A. Graham while teaching in Alabama, and they were married on August 16, 1873. Browne's education won him immediate respect in the Black community. He further enhanced his standing throughout Georgia and Alabama by speaking out against the Ku Klux Klan and as a leading temperance advocate.
Browne sought the endorsement of the Independent Order of Good Templars in Alabama, a white temperance society. The Good Templars refused to be formally associated with Blacks. Still, they offered Browne a compromise according to which he would receive a charter and sponsorship under the separate name of the Grand United Order of True Reformers. Browne accepted, quit his teaching position, and began his rise to national prominence. A superb speaker and organizer, Browne soon founded fifty local chapters, which was the number of chapters Good Templar guidelines required for establishing a state organization called a Grand Fountain.
Browne enhanced his authority and expanded his audience through the church. The Colored Methodist Episcopal Church Conference of Alabama licensed him to preach and ordained him in August 1876. That same year, the Grand Lodge of Good Templars of Virginia invited Browne to lead its new branch of the True Reformers in Richmond. After a promising start, interest in the Reformers quickly dwindled.
Browne returned to Alabama, where he developed plans to transform his temperance society into an insurance organization with a bank. Still, he could not obtain the state charter necessary for the enterprise. In 1880, he moved to Richmond to take control of the weak Grand Fountain of Virginia and continued to work on his plan to create a business empire out of the True Reformers. Shortly after he arrived in Richmond, he also served as pastor of the Leigh Street Methodist Episcopal Church.
Browne's first insurance effort, the Mutual Benefit and Relief Plan of the United Order of True Reformers, was a poorly planned saving and death benefit system that depended on continually recruiting new members to pay its beneficiaries, making it little more than a Ponzi scheme.
In January 1884, the General Assembly passed a bill incorporating the Supreme Fountain Grand United Order of True Reformers. In 1885, after further study, the True Reformers instituted the first insurance plan of an African American fraternal society based on actuarial calculations of life expectancies. Members and prospective members paid varying fees for their insurance according to their ages. The insurance system proved quite profitable and soon supported other Reformer enterprises.
Browne established the Rosebud department to instill thrift principles in members' children. He also expanded the order's business operations by purchasing real estate in Richmond and elsewhere as the order spread across Virginia and the eastern United States.
His most daring move came on March 2, 1888, when the order received a state charter for the nation's first Black-owned, black-operated bank. The True Reformers' Bank prospered for years and was the only bank in Richmond to continue honoring checks during the financial panic of 1893.
In 1891, the Reformers dedicated a new hall that housed the various operations of the order. The building contained a bank, several business offices, three stores, four large meeting rooms, and a concert hall. The largest building in the city-owned by Blacks, was also constructed entirely by Blacks. By that time, the order's membership approached 10,000, and it soon acquired a hotel, published a weekly newspaper, ran a general merchandise store, and operated a home for aged members. From its humble beginnings as a temperance society, Browne built the order into the country's largest Black fraternal society and Black-owned business. The impressive new True Reformers' Hall in Richmond symbolized the order's premier position.
Success aside, Browne engendered controversy in Richmond's Black community. His conservatism and enormous ego irritated many of his contemporaries, most notably John Mitchell Jr., the editor of the Richmond Planet. Two incidents in 1895 particularly raised eyebrows. After Mitchell and a Black Massachusetts legislator presented themselves in March at the governor's mansion for a reception tendered to the visiting Massachusetts Committee on Mercantile Affairs, Browne wrote to a local newspaper criticizing their behavior and explaining his own less aggressive view of race relations: "Legal equality and cordial relation—to the extent of building up the negro race—are the desires of respectable and sensible negroes, and they are as much opposed to social equality between whites and blacks as are the whites themselves."
The following September, Browne arranged to sell his copyrighted plans for the True Reformers to the order for $50,000. Many in Richmond, particularly Mitchell, regarded the transaction as overwhelming proof of Browne's greed. Browne was one of only eight men, including Booker T. Washington, selected to represent Blacks at the Cotton States and International Exposition in Atlanta in 1895. The True Reformers' exhibition there enhanced Browne's stature and order in what proved to be his last major achievement.
In 1897, physicians discovered a cancerous tumor and urged him to have the affected arm amputated, but he refused. The cancer spread quickly, and Browne died in Washington, D.C., on December 21, 1897. He was buried in Sycamore Cemetery, and his funeral was one of the largest ever seen in Richmond's black community. Browne bequeathed his estate to his widow, except for small legacies to the boy and girl they had adopted.
