Elaine Brown (born March 2, 1943) is an American prison activist, writer, singer, and former Black Panther Party chairman who is based in Oakland, California. Brown briefly ran for the Green Party presidential nomination in 2008. She currently lives in Atlanta, Georgia, and is a founder of Mothers Advocating Juvenile Justice.
When Newton fled to Cuba in 1974 in the face of murder charges, he appointed Brown to lead the Party. The first woman to do so, Elaine Brown chaired the Black Panther Party from 1974 until 1977. In her 1992 memoir A Taste of Power, she wrote about the experience:
“A woman in the Black Power movement was considered, at best, irrelevant. A woman asserting herself was a pariah. If a black woman assumed a role of leadership, she was said to be eroding black manhood, to be hindering the progress of the black race. She was an enemy of the black people…. I knew I had to muster something mighty to manage the Black Panther Party.”
During Brown’s leadership of the Black Panther Party, she focused on electoral politics and community service. In 1977, she managed Lionel Wilson’s victorious campaign to become Oakland’s first black mayor. Also, Brown developed the Panther’s Liberation School, which was recognized by the state of California as a model school.
Brown stepped down from chairing the Black Panther Party less than a year after Newton’s return from Cuba in 1977 when Newton authorized the beating of Regina Davis, the administrator of the Panther Liberation School. This incident was the point at which Brown could no longer tolerate the sexism and patriarchy of the Black Panther Party (A Taste of Power, p. 444). She left the United States with her daughter, Ericka, and entered psychotherapy to end her addiction to Thorazine.
Brown recorded two albums, Seize the Time (Vault, 1969) and Until We’re Free (Motown Records, 1973). Seize the Time includes “The Meeting,” the anthem of the Black Panther Party.
After leaving the Black Panther Party in order to raise her daughter Ericka, Brown worked on her memoir, A Taste of Power. She eventually returned to the struggle for black liberation, especially espousing the need for radical prison reform. From 1980 to 1983 she attended Southwestern University School of Law in Los Angeles. From 1990 to 1996, she lived in France. In 1996, Brown moved to Atlanta, Georgia, and founded Fields of Flowers, Inc., a non-profit organization committed to providing educational opportunities for impoverished African-American children. In 1998, she co-founded the grassroots group Mothers Advocating Juvenile Justice to advocate for children being prosecuted as adults in the state of Georgia. Around the same time, she continued her advocacy for incarcerated youth by founding and leading the Michael Lewis Legal Defense Committee. Michael Lewis, also known as “Little B,” was sentenced to life in prison at the age of 14 for a murder that Brown believes he did not commit. Brown would eventually write a non-fiction novel, The Condemnation of Little B, that analyzes the prosecution of Lewis as part of the greater problem of the increased imprisonment of black youth.
