It’s hard to believe that Philip H. Brown is 98 years old, but he is.
Philip Brown (top row, second from left) in 11th grade, 1925, at Stanton High.
“The past 2 years, I’ve slowed down a little. It takes longer to do things,” Brown apologizes, but no apology is needed. The slender former principal of Bates High School can easily remember back to his days growing up in Annapolis at the beginning of the twentieth century and he has photographs, documents, and memorabilia to help preserve his memories.
Brown’s parents, William Henry Brown and Julia Ann Dorsey, were from Calvert County. His father, a strikingly handsome man who was born free in the 1860s, was both a minister and a grocer. Brown’s Grocery, in a white, middle-class Annapolis neighborhood, was located at the junction of Spa Road and West Street. He operated it until 1938, when he sold it to a service station owner. “Spa Road was our little world, we were born into it. I didn’t realize things other children could do that we couldn’t,” Brown notes.
Brown memorializing his father at the dedication of the Brown-Leanos Park in Annapolis, on May 13, 2000.
He remembers the execution of John Snowden, which has been described as a “legal lynching,” on February 28, 1919, and heard about the lynching of Henry Davis on December 21, 1906. “People didn’t protest. We depended upon white people for our jobs.”
He remembers the sit-ins in the 1960s at the West Street bus terminal and local restaurants. “The younger ones did it,” he says. “Carl Snowden got kicked out of high school in the 8th grade because he was protesting unequal treatment of whites over blacks. Afterwards, he went to Key School.”
Reverend William Brown was a minister at Greater Mt. Nebo AME Church on Old Mitchellville Road in Bowie and preached at Mt. Moriah AME Church on Franklin Street, now the site of the Banneker-Douglass Museum. “My family grew up in that church,” remembers Brown. “When the church was dedicated, Frederick O. Douglass gave the dedication oratory. Rachel and I were married in the parsonage.” The “new” church is on Bay Ridge Road in Eastport.
Ninety-four-year-old Rachel S. Hall Brown still cooks their meals and works on crossword puzzles in her spare time. The Browns met while teaching together at a schoolhouse not far from the Bay Bridge in 1930.
Philip Brown attended Stanton Elementary and High School. The building, now the Stanton Community Center, [Query: Can we get him to clarify the preceding sentence? Bates High School is well known as having been the only high school for Black students in the county for generations. Clarifying its relationship to the Stanton School would be educational.]is on West Washington Street, near its intersection with Clay Street. The neighborhood, once considered a lively Harlem of the South, was a cultural crossroads for the African American community, filled with nightclubs, hotels, grocers, and shops. Famed singer Pearl Bailey lived in a Clay Street hotel for 2 years in her youth. “Urban renewal” wiped it all away—the Stanton Center is one of the few survivors.
Brown graduated in 1926 and attended Bowie State Normal School, now Bowie State University. It was one of the few places in the state where a black student could go for a post–high school education. He was a star football player and was inducted into the school’s Hall of Fame in 1977.
Upon graduation from the 2-year program, he was certified as a teacher, qualified to teach grades 1 through 7. With his teaching certificate in hand, he was made principal, at age 19, of a school in the Marley Neck area of Glen Burnie—one of 42 of what were known as colored schoolhouses in the county. He lived in the community and walked to school. It was a short stint, followed by another one at Brown’s Woods. Then he went back to the Stanton School for orientation. Rachel Hall, a graduate of the State Normal School for Colored Pupils, in Baltimore, was also there. The two were assigned in 1930 to a Rosenwald school on the Broadneck Peninsula, near the intersection of Skidmore Drive and Colbert Road, not far from the Bay Bridge. The schoolhouse is now a pile of rotted boards. Brown was the principal.
“After 2 years, I ‘discovered’ Rachel,” he laughs. “We didn’t make much money each, but, I said to her, ‘Together we can do something.’ We got married in 1932. I got paid a little more as principal because I had to fire the stove and clean the building. I got an extra $5 a month to do it.” His paycheck was $70 a month. A white man would have received at least $40 more for handling the same duties.
November 2006: Philip L. Brown, 97, and his bride, Rachel S. Hall Brown, 94, in the recreation room of their home in Arundel on the Bay.
After several years, he was back at Stanton again, this time as the principal, overseeing fourteen teachers. In 1944, the state changed the educational system from an 11-year process to the current 12-year program (not including kindergarten or pre-K).
He was transferred to Bates, which had handled grades 9 through 11. It became a “junior-senior” high school, dealing with grades 6 through 12.
The Browns also enrolled part-time at Morgan College (now Morgan State University) in the evenings and summers to qualify for their bachelor’s degrees. They finally earned their degrees in 1947. Then the duo decided to go for their master’s degrees through New York University extension courses. The state paid for them to get the degree—in another state. It did not want the Browns attending its all-white universities.
A professor traveled to either Baltimore or Washington once a week for classes or the Browns and three colleagues piled into a car for the drive north. They stayed in the Washington Square Hotel, close by the college. They finally received their master’s degrees in 1955.
Five years later, with their children (Philip Jr., of Columbia, and Errol Sr., of Ellicott City) all grown, they moved into their three-bedroom home in Arundel on the Bay. “I don’t mind telling you, we paid $26,000 for this house,” he laughs. “Now it’s worth in the high 800s.” Today they have numerous grandchildren and great-grandchildren.
It took 10 years for Anne Arundel County politicians to act on the 1954 Supreme Court decision to desegregate schools. County schools finally integrated when the Department of Health, Education and Welfare, under the orders of President Lyndon B. Johnson, instructed counties nationwide to desegregate by September 1966.
“White children came to Bates for the first time in 1966. I stayed for 4 more years before retiring,” Brown says. Mrs. Brown retired years later, after a long career as vice principal at Tyler Heights Elementary.
He doesn’t think he’d enjoy teaching today. “I’ve been displeased, on a couple of visits, by the disorder and disorganization in the classrooms. I ran a tight ship at Bates. When classes changed, you went down the hall on the right side. I like organization and orderliness. I don’t think I could do now what I did then. I’m a little older.”
The Browns will be celebrating their seventy-fifth wedding anniversary on Labor Day, September 3 (they were actually married on September 4), and Errol Brown is planning a gala celebration.
Mr. Brown is not so sure he wants to go. “We had our fiftieth at the old Holiday Inn in Parole. That was enough.”
Until recently, Brown did all the gardening. “I’m not sick. I take only four pills a day for my blood pressure. I have arthritis in my knees so we use wheelchairs when we go out.” He gave up driving at age 90.
“He fusses like that and takes a long time to get ready,” says the younger Brown. “But when he gets there, it’s impossible to get him to leave. He’s the life of the party. When the Wiley H. Bates Legacy Center was dedicated this fall, he said he’d only stay for an hour. After he did the introductory speech, he stayed 7 hours and had a great time.”
Black Education in the State of Maryland
A shortage of schoolhouses for black children prompted George Washington Carver to approach Julius Rosenwald, then president of Sears Roebuck, for help in 1912. At Carver’s urging, the Chicago retail executive funded the construction of one- and two-room wooden schoolhouses all over the rural south specifically to educate what were then known as colored children. Local governments lagged in funding schoolhouses for these children. Of the 4977 Rosenwald schools eventually built by 1928, 149 were in Maryland.
The issue of salary inequities between white and black teachers was an annual issue starting in the early 1920s. Each time it came up, the all-white board of education patronizingly explained it “didn’t have the budget” to equalize the pay.
“When we were getting $700 a year, white teachers were getting $1,100,” recounts Philip L. Brown, principal of several local schools from 1928 to 1970. “A black principal received $1,400 annually and a white principal at the same size school got $2,400
School boards wouldn’t act. State and county governments refused to act. Black teachers who spoke up found themselves without jobs. The black county teachers’ association petitioned the NAACP for help and attorney Thurgood Marshall, en route to becoming the first black U.S. Supreme Court justice, was sent to Annapolis to meet the teachers.
“He went over our records and felt we’d exhausted all remedies. We needed a plaintiff and Walter Mills (for whom Mills-Parole School is named) was selected and worked with Mr. Marshall on plans for a lawsuit. Anne Arundel County was taken to court. The judge ruled in our favor and issued an injunction ordering the county board to cease paying salaries based on race,” Brown continues.
“Later, the state legislature voluntarily equalized the school term, too. It had been 140 days for colored children and 180 for whites. School used to close on May 15 and we struggled to live without a salary during the summer. I worked at the admission gate at Carrs Beach during the summer for 20 years.”
Principal Philip Brown (far left) and his wife-to-be,
assistant teacher Rachel Hall (far right) at
Skidmore Elementary School in 1930.
Language in Context A note about a term used in recounting history
Philip Brown in the late 1920's
Philip L. Brown’s reasons for writing his books, especially The Other Annapolis, are numerous but generally they can be summed up as his desire to foster a better understanding of, and greater appreciation for, what is was like being African American and growing up and living in a racially segregated city such as Annapolis. Brown also wanted to provide a permanent record of the life and times of black Annapolitans during this period.
In this context, Brown uses the word colored throughout his prose and the conversation quoted in this article. Below is his explanation for using this term versus African American or other terms:
“Down through the years, those of us of African descent have been designated or identified as Negroes, Colored, African Americans, Afro-Americans, and Blacks. During the period of my writing, or at least, during as much of it as I can recall, we were identified as colored. Our families were the colored families, we were colored children, ours were the colored churches, our schools, the colored schools and when I entered the teaching profession, I became a part of a group identified as colored teachers. Our paychecks were a different color and marked “Colored Teachers Salary Fund.” And, incidentally, they were for less than those of our white counterparts. So, there was no doubt about it, we were colored. Therefore, I will be using this designation, mostly, if not exclusively, when there is a need to identify those of my ethnic background.”
—Reprinted from The Other Annapolis with permission from author Philip L. Brown
