Elaine Brown
*Elaine Brown was born on this date in 1943. She is a Black incarceration activist, writer, singer, and former Black Panther Party chairwoman.
Elaine Brown grew up in the inner city of North Philadelphia with her mother, Dorothy Clark, and an absent father. Despite desperate poverty, Brown’s mother worked hard to provide for Elaine’s private schooling, music lessons, and clothing. During her childhood, she studied classical piano and ballet for many years at a predominantly white experimental elementary school. After graduating from Philadelphia High School for Girls, a public preparatory school for gifted young women, she studied at Temple University for less than a semester.
Brown had no plan, or money, to make a start in the music business. She met a rich white man, Jay Richard Kennedy, an author, screenwriter, composer, and close associate of Frank Sinatra. He was married and more than 30 years Brown’s senior when their affair began. Brown moved into an apartment in LA’s upmarket Westwood neighborhood on Kennedy's dollar. Through education on the American Civil Rights Movement, Capitalism, and Communism that Kennedy provided to her, Brown became involved with the Black Liberation Movement.
The year was 1965. August saw the signing into law of the Voting Rights Act outlawing discriminatory voting practices common in southern states. In the same month, the Watts riots started an infamous uprising against racist police brutality in another corner of Los Angeles.
After this pivotal relationship, Brown began working for the radical newspaper Harambee. Soon after, Brown became the first representative of the Black Student Alliance to the Black Congress in California. In April 1968, after the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr, she attended her first meeting of the Los Angeles chapter of the Black Panther Party. Brown enrolled in the University of California Los Angeles in September 1968 and later briefly attended Mills College and Southwestern University School of Law.
Later that year, Brown joined the Black Panther Party as a rank-and-file member, studying revolutionary literature, selling BPP newspapers, and cleaning guns, among other tasks. She soon helped the Party set up its first Free Breakfast for Children program in Los Angeles and its initial Free Busing to Prisons and Free Legal Aid Program. Brown was commissioned by David Hilliard, the Party chief of staff, to record her songs, a request resulting in the album Seize the Time. She eventually assumed the role of editor of the Black Panther publication in the Southern California Branch of the Party. In 1971, Brown became a Party's Central Committee as Minister of Information, replacing the expelled Eldridge Cleaver.
In 1973, Brown was commissioned by National Party founder and Minister of Defense Huey P. Newton to record more songs. These songs resulted in the album Until We're Free. As part of a directive by Party leader Newton, Brown unsuccessfully ran for the Oakland city council in 1973, getting 30 percent of the vote. She ran again in 1975, losing again with 44 percent of the vote. When Newton fled to Cuba in 1974, facing murder charges, he appointed Brown to lead the Party. Brown chaired the Party from 1974 until 1977 as the only woman to do so. In her 1992 memoir A Taste of Power, she wrote about the experience: "A woman in the Black Power movement was considered, at best, irrelevant. A woman asserting herself was a pariah. If a black woman assumed a role of leadership, she was said to be eroding black manhood to be hindering the progress of the black race. She was an enemy of the black people. I knew I would have to muster something mighty to manage the Black Panther Party.”
During Brown's leadership of the Black Panther Party, she focused on electoral politics and community service. In 1977, she managed Lionel Wilson’s victorious campaign to become Oakland’s first black mayor. Also, Brown developed the Panther's Liberation School, which was recognized by the state of California as a model school. Brown stepped down from chairing the Black Panther Party less than a year after Newton’s return from Cuba in 1977 when Newton authorized the beating of Regina Davis, an administrator of the Panther Liberation School, because she reprimanded a coworker when he did not do an assignment. This incident was the point at which Brown could no longer tolerate the sexism and patriarchy of the Party. She left Oakland with her daughter, Ericka, and moved to Los Angeles.
Brown recorded two albums, Seize the Time (Vault, 1969) and Until We're Free (Motown Records, 1973). After leaving the Black Panther Party to raise her daughter, Ericka, Brown worked on her memoir, A Taste of Power. She eventually returned to the struggle for Black liberation, especially espousing the need for radical prison reform. From 1980 to 1983, she attended the Southwestern University School of Law in Los Angeles. From 1990 to 1996, she lived in France. In 1996, Brown moved to Atlanta, Georgia, and founded Fields of Flowers, Inc., a non-profit organization committed to providing educational opportunities for impoverished Black children. In 1998, she co-founded the grassroots group Mothers Advocating Juvenile Justice to advocate for children being prosecuted as adults in Georgia. Around the same time, she continued her advocacy for incarcerated youth by founding and leading the Michael Lewis Legal Defense Committee.
In 2003, Brown co-founded the National Alliance for Radical Prison Reform, which helps thousands of prisoners find housing after they are released on parole, facilitates transportation for family visits to prisons, helps prisoners find employment, and raises money for prisoner phone calls and gifts. In 2005, while protesting a G-8 Summit in Sea Island, Georgia, Brown learned of the massive poverty in the nearby city of Brunswick, Georgia. Brown then attempted to run for mayor of Brunswick against Bryan Thompson. Running on the Green Party ticket, Brown hoped to become mayor to use her influence to bring the Michael Lewis case to prominence, as well as to empower Blacks in Brunswick by using her elected office to create a base of economic power for the city's majority Black and poor population through redistribution of the city's revenues.
Though Brown was eventually disqualified from running and voting in Brunswick because she failed to establish residency in the city, her efforts brought widespread attention to Michael Lewis’s case. She later co-founded the Brunswick Women's Association for a People's Blueprint. Brown continues her prison reform advocacy by frequently lecturing at colleges and universities in the US. From 1995 to the present, she has lectured at more than forty colleges and universities and numerous conferences. In March 2007, Brown announced her bid to be the 2008 Green Party presidential nominee. Brown felt that a campaign was necessary to promote the interests of those not represented by the major political parties, especially those of women under 30 and African Americans.
In late 2007, she resigned from the Green Party, as she found that the Party remained dominated by whites who had “no intention of using the ballot to actualize real social progress, and will aggressively repel attempts to do so.” In 2010, inmates in more than seven Georgia prisons used contraband cellphones to organize a nonviolent strike for better prison conditions; Brown became their "closest adviser outside prison walls." She "helped distill the inmate complaints into a list of demands. She held a conference call... to develop a strategy with various groups, including the Georgia chapter of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and the Nation of Islam." Brown lives in Oakland, California. She has one daughter, fathered by fellow Black Panther member Raymond Hewitt.
