Freddie A. Brown Sr. once had a front-seat to black history. Literally.
Brown, 86, lives at Asbury Methodist Village in Gaithersburg. He was born in Pineland, South Carolina, just north of Savannah, Ga. His parents owned and operated a farm with a large house. Neither had any college education. The occupants of the house included Brown and his six siblings, but also one or two teachers. Brown’s father built an extension on the house because, in those days and in that location, teachers weren’t paid enough to find a place on their own.
He and the owner of the funeral home, who was blinded after a car accident, hit it off. Brown drove him to his various speaking engagements which were used to market his business.
After graduating from Allen, the owner wanted to pay for Brown to go to the Atlanta College of Mortuary Science. Brown resisted, but when the owner sweetened the deal to include a limousine, he accepted.
For two years – 1954 and 1955 – Brown would go to school during the week and drive on the weekend through a deeply segregated South. There were, for example, only a few places where they could buy gasoline. Either that, or you let someone else get it for you, he said.
They visited churches and other places in their efforts to increase voter registration.
“We had a guy in the back seat that we couldn’t see or even smell. His name was J. Edgar Hoover. They were spying on us, all the time,” Brown remembered.
Brown’s job was to keep the car and its precious occupants safe, he said. The first time Brown should have been dead was when the car blew up. His wasn’t the only life that was spared that day. His passenger, who wasn’t yet in the car, was saved. His name was the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.
A safety measure Brown used involved stretching clear tape around portions of the car. He was the only person who knew it was there. On that fateful day, Brown noticed that the tape had been disturbed. Stepping back, he said, about 25 feet or so, and making sure others weren’t around, he pressed the remote starter on the Cadillac.
On more than one occasion, police would surround the church where King and the others were speaking. Brown’s job was to get King safely out of that situation. In several cities, he said, he also contacted the local undertaker to borrow a hearse or an ambulance.
After two years, Brown finished school and moved back to Columbia. He then served in the military, in Hawaii.
On Monday, Feb. 4, Brown accepted the Gaithersburg City Council’s proclamation for Black History Month. He spoke briefly of his time as King’s driver. And he also wore his hat.
Brown spoke more, however, about how King’s life impacted his.
After serving his country, Brown landed a job at the National Institutes of Health in Washington. Almost immediately, he noticed a lack of diversity in his new workplace. They had 3,200 people with Ph.D’s or M.D.’s, he said, but only a few of them were black.
That money wasn’t for himself. Instead, he started a “college on campus,” as he described it.
“I brought in students from historically black colleges, and NIH paid for the whole thing,” he said. They did course work, worked in the lab, and stayed at the National 4-H Center, which was all-white in those days.
Brown has folders filled with photos of some of the 1,800 students who participated in this program, which ran for 20 years.
“Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere,” King once said. Brown not only believes that but lives it.
On his time with King and other founders of the Civil Rights Movement, Brown knows that he had a front row seat – sometimes literally – to history.
Has he written a book?