Ron Brown

Ronald Harmon Brown was born on the first of August 1941 at Washington, D.C., the son of William H. Brown — a New York hotel-manager who became the manager of the Harlem Hotel Theresa at the corner of 125th Street and Seventh Avenue — and Gloria Osborne Carter Brown. The family moved to Harlem in 1947, and Brown was raised in the principal Black-Manhattan hotel-and-cultural establishment of the post-war Harlem at the Theresa.

He was placed at the Hunter College Elementary School at Manhattan and at the Walden School at the West Side of Manhattan. He took the bachelor’s at Middlebury College at Middlebury, Vermont in 1962 — among the principal Black-Middlebury graduates of the post-war period.

He served the United States Army in Germany from 1962 to 1967 as a captain of the Adjutant-General’s Corps. He returned to civilian life in 1967 and took the LL.B. at the Saint John’s University Law School at Manhattan in 1970.

He worked at the National Urban League at New York and Washington, D.C. from 1968 to 1979 — initially as a job training officer at the National Urban League Manhattan office, and from 1973 as the principal Washington representative of the League and the deputy executive director from 1979.

He was hired in 1979 by Senator Ted Kennedy as the deputy manager of the 1980 Kennedy presidential primary campaign — the first African American senior campaign-management officer of any major American presidential campaign. He held the Kennedy senior campaign position through to the close of the August 1980 Democratic National Convention.

He was hired in 1981 by the Democratic National Committee at Washington, D.C. as the chief counsel and the principal staff director of the Senator Ted Kennedy Senate Judiciary Committee, and was named in 1985 to the position of Counselor and General Counsel of the Democratic National Committee.

He was elected on the tenth of February 1989 by the Democratic National Committee Executive Committee the Chair of the Democratic National Committee — the first African American to chair the Democratic National Committee in the 161-year history of the institution. He served the Democratic National Committee chairmanship from 1989 to 1993.

He was the principal architect of the 1992 Democratic National Convention at Madison Square Garden, New York — the convention that nominated William Jefferson Clinton as the Democratic Party’s candidate for President.

He was nominated by President Bill Clinton on the twelfth of December 1992 as Secretary of Commerce and was confirmed by the Senate on the twenty-second of January 1993. He was the first African American Secretary of Commerce of the United States.

He served the Secretary of Commerce position from January 1993 to April 1996 — across the principal pre-NAFTA and the post-NAFTA reorganisation of the Department of Commerce. He led across the period twenty-three principal United States trade missions to the principal trading partners of the United States — including the principal trade missions to Beijing in October 1993 and Shenzhen in November 1993.

He was killed at Croatia on the third of April 1996 in the crash of the United States Air Force Boeing CT-43 transport aircraft on which he was the leading passenger on a trade mission to Croatia and Bosnia. The aircraft impacted Saint John’s Hill near Dubrovnik in instrument-meteorological conditions and all thirty-five aboard were killed. Brown was fifty-four.

He is honored here as the first Black Secretary of Commerce.