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Originally published as the cover story for “Pulse,” Jan. 29, 2008
Dr. King and Bishop Brown
Cincinnati leader carries on civil rights pioneer’s legacy
By Reporter Zachary Petit
DOWNTOWN — Shuffling, singing and powerfully snaking its way along the freezing riverfront, a seemingly endless swell of people marches up Vine Street and gathers at Fountain Square.
Some Cincinnati notables approach the microphone, and one wishes the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. happy birthday. It’s the third Monday in January, and he would have been 79.
The eclectic crowd is ecstatic despite the relentless 19-degree weather that makes even the ink in a reporter’s pen freeze: eyes to the stage, they whoop hollers of support and raise sporadic choruses of clapping gloved hands that thunder with a muted resonance.
As the speakers cycle through their brief turns, a man takes to the stage in dark glasses and ear-warmers, and his energy is raw and immediately apparent. He speaks for only a handful of minutes, but his voice bellows across the buildings downtown, breathing fire through puffs of emphatic steam. It’s like watching someone from another time and place; with a monochromatic veneer and some dust and scratches, the short but lively scene could probably fit smoothly into a civil rights documentary from the ’60s.
Which, if you think about it, makes sense. After all, the man on stage did stand by King in other historic moments now engrained in the folds of a black-and-white past.
Today, he reiterates King’s quest by calling for a battle against racism, poverty and violence.
“Are we going to do that?” he asks.
“Are we going to do that?” he bellows, repeatedly, adding a throbbing pulse to the moment by emphatically slicing his hand through the brittle air.
The crowd yells in concurrence.
In the midst of the address, a nearby woman curiously asks her companion, “Who is this again?”
It’s Bishop E. Lynn Brown, ma’am.
Taking root
When tracing 71-year-old Brown’s roots, head south.
“I was what you call a country boy,” he says. “My mother had an eighth-grade education, and my daddy had a third-grade education.”
Hailing from Madison County, Tenn., Brown earned his bachelor’s degree at Lane College in Jackson, Tenn., and picked up his master of divinity credentials from the Interdenominational Theological Center in Atlanta. While he went on to do doctoral studies at the McCormick Theological Seminary in Chicago, it was in Atlanta that a formative thing happened for Brown: he met Martin Luther King Jr. As a student, Brown recalls, King would stop by and speak to his classes; then, he would ask the scholars to march with him.
After he left McCormick, Brown was given an appointment to pastor in Memphis, where in 1968 some 1,300 predominantly black sanitation workers were on strike after being denied proper wages, benefits and working conditions. As the mayor refused to give in to the workers, Brown and others marched and rallied. King eventually showed up to support the strike as part of his Poor People’s Campaign.
After walking in the march that turned confrontational and prompted the city’s occupation by the National Guard, King returned to Memphis. This time, he geared up for an April 3, 1968, rally at Mason Temple, where he would deliver his historic “I’ve been to the mountaintop” address. On that day, he spoke his ominously foretelling phrase about the quest for equality: “I may not get there with you, but I want you to know tonight that we as a people will get to the Promised Land.” Brown was stationed at the pulpit alongside King.
“That was his last speech, and I was fortunate enough to be there with him,” he says.
It’s a memory Brown has undoubtedly recounted innumerable times, but the impact of the story remains freshly chilling: the very next day, as King stepped out of his motel room around 6 p.m., a sniper’s bullet tore through his cheek, severed his spine and ended the civil rights leader’s life.
King was heading out the door to eat soul food with local Rev. Samuel “Billy” Kyles, Brown and others.
“That was devastating,” Brown says. “I was fortunate enough to have marched with him, to have eaten with him, to have strategized with him and certainly to have listened to him and shared the pulpit with him.”
A legacy
Even when he’s casually chatting on the phone, Brown seems to exude the same verbal bravado — peppered with his Southern draw and the robust overtones of a firebrand delivering a sermon — that he does in front of a crowd. It’s kind of like conversing with an ardent poem.
He discusses the impact that King had upon his life.
“You cannot be so intertwined with a person like that without him writing something upon the tablets of your heart,” he says. “His speeches and his oratory are engrained upon the tablets of my heart, and I will never be able to get away from that. He meant a lot to me.”
After Memphis, Brown would go on to teach, preach, write books, lecture and extensively travel around the world from Europe to Africa. In 1986, he was elected the 46th bishop of the Christian Methodist Episcopal Church in Birmingham, Ala., and assigned to a district in the western reaches of the United States. Nowadays, he serves as the resident bishop in Cincinnati for the Ohio–Central Indiana and Kentucky regions of the CME Church, and he occupies a variety of community posts within organizations, from the NAACP to The Banks Working Group’s Economic Inclusion and Workforce Development Taskforce. Over the years, he has racked up a slew of awards, recognitions, trophies and honorary degrees, including a Doctor of Sacred Theology credential from Temple Bible College and Seminary.
Appropriately, Brown also serves as president of the Martin Luther King, Jr. Coalition of Greater Cincinnati, which brought an array of programs downtown to honor King’s national holiday Jan. 21 through activities such as the march and the Fountain Square address.
For Brown, it’s all about carrying King’s message into the future.
“Martin Luther King was sort of a mentor, an ideal person, someone whose values you would strive for,” he says. “Dr. King was one of the most profound men that you would ever want to see and ever want to hear. He left us a legacy.”
As for that legacy, Brown says King left a lasting impression of faith that creates the incentive to engage the three interlocking cruelties of society that the civil rights leader spoke of: racism, poverty and violence. Faith, engagement and nonviolence are key to King’s philosophy, Brown adds.
Moreover, Brown says King left a vision: he was a universalist, and thus, his message transcended everything, from race to religion.
Perhaps as a testament to that vision, the nonprofit Cincinnati MLK Coalition is comprised of a cross-section of the city, from Jewish community leaders to social justice workers. Since 1978, the group says it has worked to strengthen the community through nonviolence and understanding by keeping King’s memory and ideals alive through annual programs and other activities.
Discussing King and his dream, Brown’s ornate language and prose take on many eloquent forms, but in the end, he offers a few words that translate on a level anyone can understand — a skill his mentor himself had mastered.
“He was some fella,” Brown says.
Ferrying a legacy into the future
About a week before the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday, the National Underground Railroad Freedom Center hosted a press conference where officials laid out the plans for the celebrations to come.
The event was scheduled to last 15 minutes, but it stretched to 40, Director of Community Engagement Ernest Britton says. When Bishop Brown enters a room, Britton adds, he fills it with confidence and a “billowing of love”: Brown doesn’t merely say “we did a good job,” but instead singles out every person deserving of applause.
“It takes a little more time to do that, but it makes the people that he works for, that he leads and that he follows know that they are valued by him and that their work is good,” he says. “What more could you expect of a leader?”
As for his message, Britton believes Brown does a good job at carrying King’s torch into the future.
“I don’t know if there are any others in this country who do it as well,” he says. “He values and empowers everyone in our support of the common good.”
Through the MLK Coalition, Britton says Brown leads a collective of Jews, Christians and Muslims, blacks and whites, and he brings them together with a common focus unseen elsewhere in Cincinnati or in other cities.
He considers what it would have been like to see King and Brown share the pulpit almost four decades ago.
“Just to imagine them together,” he says, “is an incredible thought.”
Marian Spencer, herself a longtime local civil rights activist, serves as an honorary co-chair at the Freedom Center’s board of directors, which Brown also sits on.
“We’re happy to have him there,” she says. “He is a strong religious leader in this community, and very supportive of the NAACP.”
Before offering his predictions for the future, Brown first talks about the past. When King was alive, it was a pyramid era, he says: one person led an entire group. Nowadays, community leaders must organize and step up to help form a perpetual network.
“If you kill one, another will pop up,” Brown says.
And then there’s education. Brown says a solid education is poverty’s most powerful adversary, and keeping kids in school is key to putting young black men in college instead of jail.
With Black History Month just around the corner, Brown reflects on what February means to him.
“It’s an effort to not allow the legacy and the contributions and achievements of African Americans to be blighted out by the avalanche of neglected history,” he says, noting that such history can instead be used as a stepping stone to higher ground. “After all, building blocks are what you climb on.”
So, had the lady at Fountain Square gone straight to Brown with her question — “Who is this man?” — how might the man himself have answered it?
Sans intense language and the philosophical messages of his mentor, Brown offers a simple comment about himself near the end of our chat.
“I’m just a humble servant who’s trying to serve the people.”
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