Ron Brown

Ronald Harmon Brown was born on the first of August 1941 at Washington and raised in Harlem, where his father managed the Hotel Theresa — the crossroads where the great of Black America passed through the lobby of his childhood. Middlebury College graduated him in 1962; there he integrated the Sigma Phi Epsilon fraternity. Five Army years — Germany, California, Korea — made him a captain, and he took his law degree at St. John's by night, in 1970, while working days at the National Urban League, where he rose by 1976 to deputy executive director.

Politics claimed him: deputy campaign manager for Ted Kennedy in 1980, chief counsel of the Senate Judiciary Committee, then the first Black partner at the Washington firm of Patton Boggs, and manager of Jesse Jackson's 1988 convention operation. On the tenth of February 1989 the Democratic National Committee elected him its chair — the first African American ever to lead a major American political party — and he rebuilt it: the 1992 convention at Madison Square Garden and the campaign machinery behind Bill Clinton's victory were his handiwork.

In January 1993 he was sworn in as the first African American Secretary of Commerce, and he made the department an engine of commercial diplomacy — trade missions to South Africa, Mexico, Russia, India, and the 1994 China mission that signed more than five billion dollars in contracts. In 1995 an independent counsel was appointed to examine his personal finances; the inquiry was open and unresolved at his death, and its final report drew no conclusions. The record keeps that sentence, and no more.

On the third of April 1996, on a trade mission for Bosnia's postwar reconstruction, his Air Force plane struck the hill of Sveti Ivan on approach to Dubrovnik; all thirty-five aboard were killed. The Air Force found a failure of command, crew error, and a flawed instrument approach — no more, no less. He was buried at Arlington, fifty-four years old, and the Ron Brown Scholar Program has carried his name into hundreds of young lives since. Honored be Ron Brown, who opened two doors no one could close again.