Jim Brown

James Nathaniel Brown was born on the seventeenth of February 1936 at St. Simons Island, Georgia, the son of Swinton Brown — a professional prizefighter who left the household shortly after his birth — and Theresa Brown, a domestic worker. His parents separated by the time he was two. He was raised through his early childhood by his great-grandmother Nora Peterson at St. Simons Island. He moved to Long Island, New York, at eight to join his mother who had moved north for domestic-service work. He attended Manhasset High School in Long Island, where he was a multi-sport athlete — basketball, football, baseball, track and field, and lacrosse — and the integrated school's principal team athlete.

He took the football scholarship offered to him by Syracuse University in 1953 — the only Division I football scholarship available to a Black athlete in the Northeast in that year. He played football and lacrosse at Syracuse from 1953 to 1956 under the football coach Floyd "Ben" Schwartzwalder. He was a unanimous All-American in football in 1956 and a unanimous All-American in lacrosse the same year — the only twentieth-century college athlete to be a unanimous All-American in two team sports in the same calendar year. He was drafted sixth overall by the Cleveland Browns in the 1957 NFL Draft.

He played nine seasons for the Browns from 1957 to 1965. He led the National Football League in rushing in eight of those nine seasons. He was named the NFL Most Valuable Player three times — 1957, 1958 and 1965. He held at his retirement the NFL career rushing record of twelve thousand three hundred and twelve yards (a record not surpassed until Walter Payton (placed in this archive) crossed it in 1984), the NFL single-season rushing record of one thousand eight hundred and sixty-three yards (set in 1963 in a fourteen-game season), and the NFL career touchdowns record of one hundred and twenty-six.

He retired from football at the age of twenty-nine while still under contract with the Browns — the retirement letter dated the fourteenth of July 1966, in the middle of the principal-photography production of the film The Dirty Dozen in which he had been cast and which the Cleveland Browns ownership had been pressuring him to abandon. He played in over thirty films across the following four decades.

He convened in June 1967 the Cleveland Summit — the meeting of Bill Russell (placed in this archive), Kareem Abdul-Jabbar and Muhammad Ali (placed in this archive) at the Negro Industrial and Economic Union offices in Cleveland to support Ali in his refusal of the Vietnam draft. The Summit was the principal Black athletic-political alliance of the late 1960s.

He died at Los Angeles on the eighteenth of May 2023, at eighty-seven.

He is honored here as the fullback of the Cleveland Browns.