Feature: Alice Brown

A real life “she-ro”

ERICA DREIJER 

LOOKING at Angela Davis next to an African American attorney on the front page of The New York Times conjured up a dream of becoming a civil rights lawyer for 14 year old Alice Brown.

“Here was my ‘she-ro’ in handcuffs, going to court – and next to her was this African American man and he was her attorney.  That was the first time in my life I realised that there were African American attorneys,” recalled Brown.

Davis, a racial activist, came under the spotlight in August 1970 when the FBI listed her as one of the ten most wanted criminals in the United States.  She was implicated in a failed attempt to free prisoners from Soledad Prison in which four people were killed when the gun used in the incident was traced back to her.  Davis went on the run and was arrested only two months later.

At that point in Browns life, she had only come into contact with a handful of African Americans teachers and knew that there were African American women practicing as nurses.

“And I knew of African American preachers, because Sunday morning is the most segregated hour in all of America.  But male or female I had not seen or heard of an African American attorney before.

“And I said, damn, this is what you can do!  This is what you can be!  The kind of person that defends Angela Davis!  That is what I want to do.”

But she would only litigate and practice law 20 years later in 1990.

Brown is the Southern African representative for the Ford Foundation, which means “I run the office for the region and I am also the grant maker for philanthropy and arts and crafts.”

She got “stuck” in South Africa, when while “on sabbatical for a year” as a human rights fellow at Harvard “with six months worth of money”, the Ford Foundation asked her to consult for them for six months.

“So I’m bouncing back between South African and Cambridge [Massachusetts] and it must have been month number five, when the then representative of this office, John Gerhard, came to me and said to me:  Alice, I’m about to lose a staff member and I need some help.”

“And I said to him, you know John I am on sabbatical and I am probably going to just go back to the states eventually.  But okay, since I am running out of money and I could use it I could do this for four or five months and then I’ll finish off my sabbatical and then I’ll go back to the US.” 

Brown fiddles with the coasters on the table.  Organising and re-organising them into patterns. 

But during her fourth month here she had an epiphany.

“I said to myself, what are you going to do?  You are going back to where to do what?”

Brown – a trained civil rights lawyer with a particular interest in South Africa – decided that being in South Africa during its transformation was an opportunity which doesn’t present itself often.  And she decided to stay on.

“I was just saying:  man, there is all this stuff going on why the hell would you want to go back to the US to beat your head against that wall?”

At the time the Constitutional Court was being established and the Constitution was being drafted.

“And you have social and economic rights that are being written into the Constitution, very explicitly in a way they don’t exist in the US,” recalled Brown. 

“You can be in a place where you’re starting from scratch, starting with a clean slate. 

“In an atmosphere where you would be helpful; helping to facilitate the development of the human rights arena and the development of a progressive human rights culture that cannot happen in the US right now.

“What is it?  ‘South Africa alive with possibility.’  I heard the ad and I bought into it.”

So the “light bulb went off” and Brown stayed on in South Africa at the Ford Foundation, even though it meant that she wouldn’t be able to practice law or litigate.

Brown had previously worked at the Foundation in New York – from 1986 to 1990 – and was responsible for grants to black South Africans during the apartheids years.

And at the time, she believed it was destiny. 

She had decided that after completing her degree, she would first complete a Masters degree in African history at Northwestern University before returning to New York University to complete her law degree.

“It was a great disappointment to my father who didn’t understand it at all,” recalled Brown.  “As since I was 14 I had declared that I was going to be a lawyer.  So what the hell did grad school and history have to do with being a lawyer?  Why didn’t I just stay on track?”

Brown however believes that “I was ahead of my time”, since for her, to be a good civil rights lawyer it was necessary to have a good understanding of African-Americans history first.

“This was 1978, ’79, ’80 and people were looking at me in grad schools and law school like I was crazy,” recounted Brown. 

“They would say to me:  in terms of the law and those issues, you would need to look at international law.  And as a young professional you don’t get to work in the United Nations (UN), you need to be seasoned and older and there really is no way to marry these two.”

But she stood her ground. 

“So I stayed a year [at grad school] and then went to law school as I said that I was going to do” and specialised in public interest law.

In the eighteenth month of her clerkship she heard about the position at the Ford Foundation. 

The job spec required someone with a social science background in African history or African development and a law degree.

“So I said that’s my job.  That’s written for me.  And I’ve never felt that way before in my life, and I said somebody wrote that job for me.  And I applied and amazingly I got the job.”

Founded in 1936 by Edsel and Henry Ford, the Foundation operates as an independent, non-profit, non-governmental organisation with 12 offices in Africa, Asia, Latin America and Russia.

During the apartheid years, the Foundation was particularly involved with the Centre for Applied Legal Studies (CALS) at Wits, the Black Lawyers Association, Black Sash and a number of higher education programmes. 

“At that point we were particularly trying to help increase the numbers and expand the educational credentials of black South Africans.”

This included sponsoring scholarship programmes that were taking black students to the States to complete Masters and PhD degrees and local internship and fellowship programmes that allowed black students to complete degrees.

Today, the foundation is still active in higher education, but initiatives also include philanthropy, human rights issues, governance, economic and environmental development, arts and culture and sexual health on which it spends about $16 million each year across South Africa, Mozambique, Namibia and Zimbabwe.

After 5 years as a grant maker, she decided that it was time to pursue her dream as a civil rights lawyer. 

“In about 1989, I started to feel itchy, like okay, this is a great job and I’m doing great things, but I’m a grant maker.  I’m funding public interest law centers, I’m funding human law attorneys to do things … you – as a donor – are not the doer, you are funding, helping those who do.”

Having completed her law degree, passing her bar exam and finishing her clerkship with the federal law of appeal, she was a qualified as lawyer but had never practiced law. 

“And I need to do it sooner rather than later,” she decided.  “Because the longer I take to go back to it the less credibility I will have to get back into the field.”

So began Brown’s five years as a litigator at the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) Legal Defense and Education Fund.  She was responsible for the legal aspects of housing conditions, environmental justice and poverty issues for African-American communities.

“It was something I was very passionate about and nearly everybody I worked with in that agency was as passionate about.  You could literally just work 24 hours a day, seven days a week and still not do enough or not give enough.”

But after five years, she decided that she needed some time out.

“It was very, very demanding and exhausting and all consuming.  I decided to take a break.  So I took a year’s sabbatical, with six months worth of money.”

And that is how she ended back at the Ford Foundation.

Brown, a single mother, has an eight year old son, Ayanda, and even though she is a dedicated professional, “my responsibility is him”. 

“His dad is around and sees him every other weekend – ‘Disney Dad’.

“You do the discipline, you do the hard work and they come in and ‘here’s tickets to World Cup Soccer’, or ‘here’s that PlayStation that you wanted’.  And you’re ‘but he doesn’t need it’.  And he’s like, ‘he wanted it’.”

“I like parenting for the most part.  I say to my kid, I think I’ll keep you, I think the warrantee has run out.  Although, every once in a while I threaten to take him back and get my money back and he says you know it’s against the law.”

Brown tries to spend as much time with Ayanda as possible.

Generally she gets up early after having woken up two or three time during night to “send out notes on my crackburry” or make notes on her laptop. 

And every morning she cooks them oatmeal and fruit for breakfast.  After walking him to school, she gets ready to go to the office “to be faced with 15 000 things”.

“I come in with my list of things I want to do, that I want to accomplish, and then life is what kicks in when you are sitting around planning other things,” she said.

“I get phone calls and I get staff members, and I get e-mails from New York saying we need x yesterday, and can you meet with so and so who’s at the front door who hasn’t got a meeting.  So, I come in and have a crazy day.”

She generally tries to be home around 5.30pm to spend some time with her Ayanda – to share dinner and play a couple of games – before putting him to bed after which she tends to either continue working or “crashes”.

Brown describes her life growing up as very different from her sons.  She grew up in a town with in New Jersey, 20 minutes from Manhattan, called Hackensack with her four sisters and surrounded by cousins, aunts and uncles. 

“We were always running from one auntie’s house to one uncle’s house to the park with my cousins.”

According to Brown, today, everything is organised.  Nothing is as spontaneous.  And as children, they had a chance “to use your ingenuity in a way that’s different” from today.

Today, “you have to arrange a play date.  You have to arrange to go to the movies or the mall.

“We would literally just go the park and strike up a game, like something like Double Dutch, hide and seek, what have you.”

Or they would collect and return soda bottles to the store so that they had money to go to see a movie.

For Brown this is an unfortunate part of the reality with which children today have to deal with.

“Times have changed.”