Dr. Harold K. Brown, known to many as “Hal,” died this month on his 92nd birthday.
He spent most of those years fighting for the freedoms and empowerment of Black people.
Friends and colleagues said he never cared much for credit or fame. Perhaps, they said, he should’ve gotten a lot more credit than he did.
His known accomplishments are many, but it’s impossible to precisely outline their ripple effects. What would San Diego be today if Brown had not lived and worked here?
Brown became a legend even before the Civil Rights movement.
He was born in segregated York, Pennsylvania. He moved to San Diego in 1953 to attend San Diego State University on a basketball scholarship. His time was interrupted by a military draft, but he returned to become a star player and president of the school’s first Black fraternity.
While there, he joined the Wesley Foundation, a Methodist campus ministry that encouraged students to engage with racial issues.
Like York, San Diego was highly segregated. Hotels, restaurants and bars refused service to Black customers. Many employers wouldn’t hire Black workers. Property deeds in neighborhoods across San Diego restricted the sale to whites only. The city was redlined, concentrating Black residents into low-income neighborhoods.
San Diego lagged behind larger cities in California. The Civil Rights movement rattled Los Angeles and San Francisco well before it reached San Diego.
In 1961, there was still room for a recently graduated Brown to reshape San Diego County in ways that would affect Black residents for generations. That year, he formed a local chapter of the Congress of Racial Equality, one of the leading civil rights groups in the country.
While working as a junior high school teacher, Brown fought to integrate neighborhoods in El Cajon and La Mesa. He led protests – pickets and marches and sit-ins – against giants like Bank of America, San Diego Gas & Electric and the San Diego Zoo, companies he said wouldn’t hire Black people.
He was arrested and jailed for his efforts, but he persisted.
“We sent our voices throughout the city of San Diego that we’re going to continue to fight,” he told KPBS Midday Edition last year.
During this time he married Lovie LaVerne Brown, a legend in her own right. She was by his side the rest of his life.
In 1966, he hosted a live radio call-in show called “Viewpoints” discussing racial issues, often with white callers.
“Black people love freedom,” he told listeners. “Every bit as much as white people love freedom. Wherever freedom is being denied, whether it is in the continent of Africa or whether it is in the continent of North America, the cry will be ‘Let freedom ring.’”
True to those words, he took the fight overseas, becoming deputy director of the Peace Corps in Lesotho. He challenged the apartheid government there while working as a teacher and a banker.
He eventually earned a Master of Business Administration from Fordham University and began a financial career in New York, laying a foundation for what would become his lifelong mission to build Black wealth.
Back in San Diego, racial conflict at SDSU was coming to a head. In 1971, students stormed the administration building. The school then hired Brown as their first Black administrator.
He created the Africana Studies department, then known as Afro-American Studies. It was one of the first of its kind in the nation and, according to SDSU, believed to be the first to offer tenure and tenure-track faculty positions.
One of his first hires was Shirley Weber, who now serves as California’s first Black Secretary of State.
“Would I be Secretary of State if I hadn't come to San Diego and met all the people that I met? I don't know,” she said.
She described Brown as refreshingly direct, professional and almost always dressed in a suit.
It was a tense time for the few Black students on campus.
“There were a lot of race issues in San Diego. An awful lot. My students complained about the N-word being written on the doors in the dorms, kinds of things that were representative of lynchings,” she said. “They also had a slave sale, auction on the campus.”
“There was some Greek organizations, but not a lot of Black Greek organizations. And so the structure itself was not that conducive for African American students to come. A lot of students came and left, because there wasn't a lot of things that were speaking to them,” she said.
Weber said many people saw ethnic studies as a fad. But Brown brought his business mindset to the department. He taught faculty how to navigate both campus and local politics.
He made the Africana Studies professors as influential at San Diego State as they were in the politics and businesses of San Diego, she said.
According to Weber, when Brown attended SDSU there were about eight Black students.
When he revisited campus a couple years ago, eight had grown to more than 1,300.
“A tear ran down Harold’s face, he was just so excited over looking at what all his sacrifice and work had come to be,” she said.
He also created a certificate program in community economic development within the business college, which would grow into the Center for Community Economic Development.
Lack of representation in the 1970s went beyond campus. San Diego had very few Black doctors or lawyers, judges or politicians.
Brown worked to change that.
He founded a Black professional group and an economic empowerment program. He also worked alongside the NAACP to get San Diego’s city council elections moved from an at-large system to a district-based system, putting more power in Black voters’ hands.
One of his recruits was military veteran Joe Outlaw.
In 1982, Outlaw wore his military uniform to a presentation Brown gave. Outlaw said after the presentation ended, Brown called out to him: “‘Come here, Colonel!’”
“I said, ‘What does this guy want?’ He said, ‘I want you to work with me.’ Harold was the type of guy that if he saw you, he didn't ask you did you want to participate. He kind of told you,” Outlaw said, laughing. “He was the most persuasive guy I ever met.”
They became not just coconspirators in creating Black wealth in San Diego, but best friends of over 40 years, often strategizing over burgers and sweet potato fries.
Brown had this way of drawing people into the mission of Black empowerment, including Bernard Johnson, who called Brown “Mr. San Diego.”
“He was in touch with not just the Black community, but the white community. They loved Dr. Brown. That was impressive to me, considering civil rights was always somewhat of a segregated kind of thing,” Johnson said.
Not that he was without opposition.
“He knew that a lot of times you would have haters, and those haters would be right next to you in most cases. But he's just able to permeate that, just block that out and still work with those people that hate it,” Johnson said.
He said Brown would tell him, “‘They're always trying to pinpoint me. I'm just here to make sure that African Americans get an opportunity to build wealth.’”
Johnson is a real estate developer. He said he and Brown worked together to redevelop historically redlined Southeastern San Diego. Brown became a mentor and father figure to him, and a cherished friend.
“Hope was just something he believed that other people should believe in. But the audacity is what he believed in, and that audacity was like – ‘I'm going to make this happen. We're going to do this,’” Johnson said.
In 1992, Brown was named the National Minority Small Business Advocate of the Year.
He retired from SDSU in 1997 but continued as director of the Center for Community Economic Development until 2004. San Diego State University established the “Harold K. Brown Knowledge, Education and Empowerment Program” to honor Brown’s work. In 2017, the university awarded him an honorary doctorate.
Even as Brown aged, he was determined to keep fighting.
“‘I'm just tired. I'm just tired,” Johnson remembered him saying in recent years. “‘But tomorrow I'll be better because tomorrow I'll be ready to boogaloo.’ That was his favorite saying, ‘We gon’ boogaloo tomorrow.’” (Brown loved jazz and adored John Coltrane and Miles Davis.)
Last year, Brown drafted a letter to his friends announcing the Harold K. Brown Economic Development and Education Foundation, calling it his “current and final community endeavor.”
“I have founded an organization to address the areas of economic development and education for Black Americans and others who have not been able to climb up the economic ladder under our system of capitalism,” he wrote. “My goal is to help black Americans and others understand how wealth is built in our system of American capitalism, and how to achieve it to some degree. It is well known that the Black Americans are at the bottom of the wealth ladder, for Blacks have been there since slavery was abolished.”
Johnson plans to continue that foundation.
In recent years, many of the rights Brown fought so long and hard for have been challenged.
In late April, the U.S. Supreme Court gutted the 1965 Voting Rights Act prohibiting racial discrimination in voting.
Weeks later, Brown died.
Weber thinks he would be disappointed “that even though he would open those doors, that no one of us didn't feel as committed to keeping those doors open as African Americans and those who are affected by it. That's the saddest part about it, is that people are willing to just shut the doors, change the rules, not see the continuing racism.”
She described Brown’s work for equal rights as a “long, long journey.”
“And then to just have it be picked apart and thrown away as if it’s unimportant . . .” she said.
Outlaw said he would discuss current events with Brown.
“Him and I both had a very deep feeling about what's going on and effects to people of color,” he said. “But we were too old to march and too old to go to jail. So – what? But whenever and wherever this guy could help, he was there.”
Last November Brown spoke to KPBS Midday Edition about legal challenges to decades old civil rights legislation.
“I answer the question all the time – ‘Hal, why don't you stop? You've done enough now. You have to just just sit back and rest and relax,’” he told Midday Edition last year. “And I would tell them, ‘I can't do that. I'm still fighting for all of the people who came before me. I came from humble beginnings. You know, I'm fighting for my mother, my family, my friends. If they can't fight, I can fight. And I'm going to continue to do that until the day I die.’”
His friends said he kept that promise.
