Inspiration: Keith Brown

By Elizabeth Macanufo 

This article first appeared in the Winter 2008 issue of IN magazine.

Keith Brown clearly remembers his feelings on April 4, 1968. “There was no doubt about it. I was angry, depressed and devastated!” His hometown, Memphis, Tenn., had become the backdrop of a savagely heinous crime and history altering event. In the wake of this tragedy, he witnessed “city police and state troopers patrolling the streets with shotguns hanging out of the windows of their cars. Memphis was a dangerous place for young black men on that day and some of them lost their lives.”

His inspiration, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., had been assassinated. Dr. King’s assassination, along with John and Robert Kennedy, still affects Brown, a self-described “child of the ’60s.” Now the executive vice president of Africa Programs for the Jane Goodall Institute, Brown has committed his life and his career to carrying out the legacy of his heroes.

After graduating in the top ten percent of his high school class, Brown attended Lincoln University in Pennsylvania, the first historically black university in the United States. His parents urged their son to “get a more diverse life experience than what they had. They wanted me to view the larger American context.” He fulfilled their wishes by fraternizing with African- Americans from across the nation, as well as African students from the continent’s west coast. “I was truly educated there,” he says. The business major also studied black history, learning about African kingdoms, the African slave trade, and the impact of the black community on the western hemisphere.

In college, Brown focused intensely on current events. When politician George Wallace was shot in 1972, Lincoln’s campus closed for fear that the nearby chapter of the Ku Klux Klan would attack the campus. Remembers Brown, “I was concerned about what direction the country was going to go in at that point in time. It was a bit unnerving.”

Determined to become a banker after graduation, Brown hoped to provide financial services to the black community. During his senior year, his economics professor presented him with a life changing opportunity. “The African Bureau of the United States Agency for International Development established an internship program to give African-Americans experience working overseas as a way to interest them in joining the foreign- service,” he recalls. Brown received government training in economic development and was assigned to Liberia as an intern. “I felt like I was going to the moon to be so far away.”