Jim Brown, football great, activist, dies at 87

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When the modern civil rights movement gained momentum in the 1950s, few elite athletes spoke out on racial issues. Brown was an exception.

Working to promote economic development in Cleveland’s Black neighborhoods while playing for the Browns,he founded the Negro Industrial and Economic Union (later known as the Black Economic Union) as a vehicle to create jobs. It facilitated loans to Black businessmen in poor areas..

In June 1967, Brown invited other leading black athletes, most notably Bill Russelland Lew Alcindor (the future Kareem Abdul-Jabbar), to the ofce of his Economic Union to hear Muhammad Ali after Ali had been stripped of his heavyweight boxing title and faced imprisonment for refusing to be drafted in protest over the Vietnam War.

The meeting is viewed as a watershed for the development of racial awareness among athletes, Brown and the others at the session publicly voiced their support for Ali.

In 1988, he founded Amer-I-Can, an organization that ofers personal development for young African-Americans. Brown also participated in the Civil Rights movement in the 1960s and helped create a business preparedness organization called the Negro Industrial Economic Union, according to www.cleveland.com.

Brown’s legacy would be tarnished more than a half-dozen arrests, in most cases when women accused him of violent behavior.

“I can defnitely get angry, and I have taken that anger out inappropriately in the past,” Brown