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DR. KENNARD BROWN
n his office in the heart of the University of Tennessee Health Science Center campus, Dr. Kennard Brown looks through a book published in 1986 to celebrate the school’s 75th anniversary. “What’s conspicuously absent is any substantive noteworthiness of any African American here,” says Brown, executive vice chancellor and chief operations officer for the UTHSC system. “Since then, we’ve gone through a stark revolution concerning race. I think that’s something that we can be very proud of. And I think this is the mandate that Dr. Martin Luther King left us all. We have a social responsibility to offer everybody an equal opportunity to contribute to the greater good.” Growing up in Hayti, Missouri, and later Chicago, Illinois, Brown remembers, “All I ever wanted to be was a police officer.” His family were mostly sharecropper farmers,
became convinced that the only pathway was an education.” After high school, he joined the Marine Corps, and then came to Memphis, where he attended the University of Memphis and Southwest Tennessee Community College. “I graduated from both of them the same year,” he says, “with an associate’s degree in psychology and a bachelor’s degree in psychology, with an emphasis on criminal justice.” Instead of the police force, Brown joined the U.S. Postal Service, working as a postal inspector. Assigned to Miami, he worked the narcotics task force there for six years. “I still had this notion of being a policeman,” he says, “but my wife wanted nothing to do with that, because she knew I’d never be home.” Since
“IF WE CAN ATTRACT MORE MINORITY PROFESSIONALS, THAT WOULD MEAN MORE HEALTHCARE PROVIDED TO THESE COMMUNITIES, AND THE OVERALL WELL-BEING OF THE PEOPLE WHO LIVE THERE GETS BETTER IN AN EVOLUTIONARY WAY.” “working for the people whose land they lived on,” he says. “But even though they couldn’t read or write, all they talked about was the importance of school.” Brown listened, saying, “I
her parents lived in Memphis, Brown returned here and enrolled in the Cecil C. Humphreys School of Law, where he earned his juris doctorate. That’s where he noticed a definite racial dynamic. “There were 22 African Americans in my class when I started law school, and 20 of them washed out the first year.” This was a far higher percentage than white students, and some students
expected him to join their protest of discrimination. “I kept thinking, I see the argument you guys want to make,” Brown says, “but I’m nobody. I don’t have any connections. I was just a guy studying at night and doing the best I could do.” After he graduated, he applied for a clerkship in the law department at UT. Brown remembers “a lot of complaints about discrimination being
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