Elaine Brown

For the tax protester, see Edward and Elaine Brown.

Elaine Brown (born March 2, 1943 in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania) is an American prison activist, writer, singer, and former Black Panther Party chairman who is based in Oakland, California. Brown briefly ran for the Green Party presidential nomination in 2008. She currently lives in Atlanta, Georgia, and is a founder of Mothers Advocating Juvenile Justice.

Early life

Elaine Brown grew up in the ghetto of North Philadelphia, with a single, working mother Dorothy Brown and an absent father. Despite desperate poverty, Brown’s mother worked to provide for Elaine’s private schooling, music lessons, and nice clothing. She studied classical piano and ballet for many years in her youth at a predominantly white experimental elementary school. As a young woman, Elaine had few African-American friends but spent most of her time with her white friends. 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. After withdrawing from Temple, Brown moved to Los Angeles, California to try being a professional songwriter. While in Los Angeles Brown enrolled in the University of California Los Angeles in September of 1968. She later went on to briefly attend Mills College and Southwestern University School of Law.

Upon arriving in California with little money and few contacts, Brown got work as a cocktail waitress at the strip club The Pink Pussycat. While working at the Pink Pussycat she met Jay Kennedy, a married white fiction writer, and the two became lovers. Kennedy was the first person to politicize and radicalize Brown. Because of the thorough education on the Civil Rights Movement, Capitalism, and Communism, that Kennedy gave her, Brown became involved with the Black Liberation Movement. After living together for a brief time in the Hollywood Hills Hotel, the pair parted ways. After this pivotal relationship, Brown's involvement in politics grew and she 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 Junior, she attended her first meeting of the Los Angeles chapter of the Black Panther Party.

Involvement with the Black Panther Party

In 1968, Brown joined the Black Panther Party as a rank-and-file member, studying revolutionary literature, selling Black Panther Party newspapers, and cleaning guns, among other tasks. Brown soon helped the Party set up its first Free Breakfast for Children program in Los Angeles, as well as the Party’s initial Free Busing to Prisons Program and Free Legal Aid Program.

In 1968, 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 member of the Party's Central Committee as Minister of Information, replacing the expelled Eldridge Cleaver. In 1973, Brown was commissioned to record more songs by national party founder and Minister of Defense Huey P. Newton. These songs resulted in the album "Until We're Free."

As part of a directive by Black Panther Party leader Huey Newton, Brown unsuccessfully ran for the Oakland city council in 1973, getting 30 percent of the vote. Brown ran again in 1975, losing again with 44 percent of the vote.

When Newton fled to Cuba in 1974 in the face of murder charges, he appointed Brown to lead the Party. The first woman Chairman of the party, Elaine Brown was the Chairman of the Black Panther Party from 1974 until 1977. 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 had 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 Chairman of the Black Panther Party less than a year after Newton’s return from Cuba in 1977 when Newton authorized the beating of Regina Davis, the administrator of the Panther Liberation School. This incident was the point at which Brown could no longer tolerate the sexism and patriarchy of the Black Panther Party (A Taste of Power, p. 444). Brown left the United States with her daughter, Erika, and entered psychotherapy to end her addiction to Thorazine.

Brown recorded two albums, Seize the Time (Vault, 1969) and Until We're Free (Motown Records, 1973). Seize the Time includes "The Meeting," the anthem of the Black Panther Party.

Affair with Jay Richard Kennedy

In Brown's book, she references having met, fallen in love with and cohabitated with Jay Richard Kennedy (aka Jay Richard Solomonick) from 1965-1968. Kennedy was, she says, a white man who 'taught her how to appreciate her blackness' and that his love caused her to join 'The Movement'. She states that she knew and admired that fact that he had been an accomplished OSS officer (precursor to the CIA) and that the protagonist of the novel that Kennedy wrote (during their three-year relationship), "The Chairman" was a CIA agent tasked with 'traveling to China to kill Chairman Mao Tse Tung, the then Chinese Communist leader. In his research, the late Philip H. Melanson, former Chancellor Professor of Policy Studies, and chair of the Political Science Department at University of Massachusetts Dartmouth made over 95 Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests. These requests, which resulted in the release of over 200,000 pages of federal government documents, revealed that Jay Richard Kennedy was in fact then CIA U.S. Domestic Security Branch Informant A.

Jay Richard Kennedy was the agency's KEY informant within Rev. Martin Luther King's inner circle. Historically, Jay Richard Kennedy was in fact from 1939-1942 an agent of the US Bureau of Narcotics assigned to Latin America. During WWII, Kennedy became an agent of the OSS. He later was in short order, manager for both Frank Sinatra and Harry Belafonte (who summarily fired him), a part owner of the Sands Hotel in Las Vegas, full owner of a prominent Wall Street brokerage that bore his name, a sitting member of the New York Stock Exchange, owner of an electronics firm in Canada specializing in radio proximity artillery fuses for the US military in Vietnam, and from the late 1960s, concurrently, head of the American Psychological Association.

Curiously, about the time that Brown met Kennedy he was also reporting directly to the then CIA Domestic Security Branch on what were called 'Civil Rights Matters'. In fact, on 8 June 1965, Jay Richard Kennedy reported to the Chief of the CIA Security Research Section (SRS) that Rev. Martin Luther King, Jr. was "a Maoist". Kennedy further reported that "Martin Luther King, Jr. is moving in a way that is indicative that he is being controlled by Peking Line Communists." Additionally, On 11 May 1965, Kennedy reported, "Martin Luther King MUST be removed from the leadership of the Negro movement, and his removal must come from within not from without. (Kennedy) feels that somewhere in the Negro movement, at the top, there must be a Negro leader who is "clean' who could step into the vacuum if Martin Luther King were either exposed or assassinated." It was the studied opinion of both Dr. Philip Melanson, Dr. William F. Pepper (a close friend of the King family) that Jay Kennedy deliberately set in motion certain intelligence events that culminated in the assassination of Rev. Martin Luther King, three years after Kennedy's paranoid conclusions were handed to the SRS section of CIA,. Ironically, shortly before Kennedy's 1991 death, he confessed to having 'provided certain information regarding Dr. King and Civil Rights to CIA' , in the seminal documentary " 'Who Killed Martin Luther King?' " by French filmmaker Michel Parbot.

Lack of extensive FBI file

Contemporary Civil Rights historians have long questioned why amongst all prominent Black Panther Party leaders, only Brown has no FBI file of any length, whilst files of other Panther leaders were frequently as long as twenty thousand pages. This is especially glaring as Brown was the Chairman of the Party for several years. Additionally, Brown was demonstrably the only Panther national leader never to have been extensively incarcerated or exiled. FBI informant Earl Anthony (who publicly confessed to being a paid FBI informant as early as 1970) asserted in his 1990s autobiography, that Jay Richard Kennedy was a highly placed CIA operative within the Civil Rights Movement, who in fact financed and inserted both Mr. Anthony and Ms. Brown, then close friends, into prominent positions within the "Black Power Movement," through his Civil Rights connections. In recent years, some Civil Rights Movement historians have pointed to Brown's drug arrest and release without charges (after bringing a quantity of cocaine into San Quentin prison) in 1975 as now being worthy of closer historical examination.

Murder of Betty Van Patter

Writer David Horowitz has accused Brown of ordering the murder of Betty Van Patter, a former Black Panther Party accountant and mother of three, in 1973. Horowitz alleges that Van Patter intended to go public with illegalities she had uncovered in the Black Panthers account books, and that Brown had Van Patter murdered because these allegations would have hindered Brown's city council bid. Brown's 1992 book A Taste of Power claimed that Van Patter had a criminal past and had been convicted of drug trafficking. After protests by the Van Patter family, these claims were removed from subsequent editions of the book as they turned out to be a fabrication by Elaine Brown.^{[citation needed]}

Later activism

After leaving the Black Panther Party in order to raise her daughter Erika, Brown worked on her memoir, A Taste of Power. Brown eventually returned to the struggle for black liberation, especially espousing the need for radical prison reform. From 1980 to 1983 she attended 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 African-American children. In 1998, Brown co-founded the grassroots group Mothers Advocating Juvenile Justice to advocate for children being prosecuted as adults in the state of Georgia. Around the same time, Brown continued her advocacy for incarcerated youth by founding and leading the Michael Lewis Legal Defense Committee. Michael Lewis, also known as “Little B,” was sentenced to life in prison at the age of 14 for a murder that Brown believes he did not commit. Brown would eventually write a non-fiction novel, The Condemnation of Little B, which analyzes the prosecution of Michael Lewis as part of the greater problem of the increased imprisonment of black youth.

In 2003, Brown helped co-found 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 in order to use her influence to bring 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’ case. She later became a co-founder of the Brunswick Women's Association for a People's Blueprint.

Brown has continued her prison reform advocacy by lecturing frequently at colleges and universities in the US. From 1995 to the present, she has lectured at over forty colleges and universities, as well as 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 the interests of women under 30 and African-Americans. Her platform focused on the needs of working-class families, promoting living wages for all, free health care, more funding for public education, more affordable housing, removal of troops from Iraq, improving the environment, and promoting equality. Brown intended on using her campaign to bring many minorities to the Green party in hopes that it would better represent a revolutionary force for social justice. In late 2007, Brown 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."

Outside of the Movement

Brown is the mother of a grown daughter, Ericka Abram. Little is known about Ericka's father but Brown credits the upbringing of her daughter to the movement. The Black Panter Party took a community approach to the rearing of its members' children.

Elaine lived in France for seven years before returning to the U.S. in 1996. She has traveled extensively throughout the world, from China, North Korea, Vietnam, Cuba, Algeria to Germany, Italy, Russia, Argentina, Uruguay, Costa Rica, Belize and elsewhere.

Brown has recorded two albums of original songs, one for Motown records, Until We're Free. The other, her classic 1969 album Seize the Time with Horace Tapscott and the Pan Afrikan Peoples Arkestra includes "The Black Panther Party National Anthem" (The Meeting), re-released as a CD in 2007 by Warner Bros.

Currently, she is writing a biography of Jamil Al-Amin (formerly H. Rap Brown)For Reasons of Race and Belief co-authored by Karima Al-Amin set for publishing in 2013 (Lawrence Hill Books.) In addition she is completing the non-fiction book Melba and Al, A Story of Black Love in Jim Crow America (for 2013 publication by Feminist Press). She currently holds position as Editor of Messages to Our Brothers and Sisters on the Other Side of the Wall, a collection of autobiographical essays by black prisoners in New Mexico, published (2007) by the New Mexico Department of African American Affairs.

As of 2013, Elaine is the Executive Director of the Michael Lewis Legal Defense Committee. Brown also holds positions as a member of the Committee to Free Romaine "Chip" Fitzgerald, the Steering Committee of the December 9th Georgia and International Prisoners’ Rights Movement, organizer and speaker for the Occupy4Prisoners movement in Oakland, California and the Advisory Board of the 100 Black Men Charter School in Oakland.

From 1995 up until present day Elaine Brown continues to share her experience with lecture series based around the topic of “New Age Racism in America.” Her lectures run in over forty public and private universities nation-wide.

Elaine Brown currently resides in Oakland, California

Bibliography

• Brown, Elaine. The Condemnation of Little B: New Age Racism in America. (Boston: Beacon, 2002).
• Brown, Elaine. A Taste of Power: A Black Woman’s Story. (New York: Doubleday, 1992).

External links

• Elaine Brown, Brown's Web site.
• Brown's MySpace page, including a recording of her "The End of Silence."
• Seize the Time, a Web site "dedicated to promoting the vision of Elaine Brown."
• Interview with Elaine Brown.
• "Black Panther Party long victimized by campaign of lies", an article by Brown in the March 25, 2000 Atlanta Journal-Constitution
• Elaine Brown on Georgia Prison Strike: “Repression Breeds Resistance” - video interview by Democracy Now!