“I always wanted to write a book about my family story and the civil rights movement, but also layer that with Black history,” Percy Brown Jr. tells Madison365. “Being in education and knowing that that’s just something that’s always been a passion of mine, I wanted to make sure that not just Black students, but all people, have an opportunity to learn a more comprehensive story of Black history.”
Brown, a nationally recognized educator with over 20 years of experience in K-12 and higher education with a background in history, political science, and educational leadership, recently debuted his first book “Strength Through Generations: A Black American Family’s Fight for Equality Through Faith, Love, and Education Paperback.” Launched in March, the 172-page book takes the reader on an in-depth journey to understanding the history of race and its evolution to shape the current cultural climate in the United States.
Brown comes from a family of civil rights activists who fought for equal rights in the Jim Crow South during the ’50s and ’60s in Bolivar County, Mississippi. His grandfather, Morgan Brown, Jr., was an educator for over three decades and led the fight to desegregate all-white schools.
Brown, who is currently the CEO of North Star Consulting Services, Inc., says the impetus for the book started when he was an undergraduate college student at Delta State University in the heart of the Mississippi Delta, about 17 miles from where his dad grew up.
“My background is in history. My grandfather was born in 1899 and my dad’s side of the family, they were involved in the [civil rights] movement in the ’50s and ’60s,” Brown remembers. “They were part of the first wave of Blacks to desegregate the all-white schools in Rosedale, Mississippi, and so, you know, in college, I just kept telling myself, ‘Man, I need to sit down and get my grandfather’s story on paper. Being born in 1899, he saw so much in his lifetime.’”
Unfortunately, his grandfather passed away before he could do that.
“It was a huge regret for me for years, and I was actually journaling during my time of meditation in the morning back and I’ve done a lot of public speaking over the years, and because of that, I felt I started having these issues with with writing,” Brown remembers. “It was almost like I lost confidence in writing. And one morning, April 26, I just wrote it down. I said, I’m gonna turn my weakness into a strength, and I’m gonna write a book to inform the people.”
His thoughts he was journaling were seen by a CEO of a publishing company that reached out to him on LinkedIn, telling him that he had a story that should be a book.
“I connected with her, and I started that journey last year in April. And boom, here you have it. ‘Strength Through Generations: A Black American Family’s Fight for Equality Through Faith, Love, and Education,'” Brown says. “I researched my family history, and I was able to trace my dad’s side family back to 1823 … I don’t know if my family was enslaved or not. I did that work and worked with the publishing company, and now I have a book.”
Brown adds the timing of the release of the book, which happened a few weeks ago, is important.
“It’s so crazy that the book is coming out at the time that it is right now. It couldn’t be a better time, especially with everything that this presidential administration is doing … threatening the Black History Museum in D.C. They took Jackie Robinson’s story down. You know what he’s done with DEI positions at the federal level, his threats to DEI work at the university level, and eventually, it’s going to hit public schools,” Brown says. “So in a lot of ways, this book is just a complete rebuke of everything that the President is trying to do right now specifically around the history of Black people.”
Through his family’s personal story and experiences, “Strength Through Generations” details Brown’s own story of cultivating his identity of self within the complex reality of being Black in America.
“I dedicated an entire chapter about my grandfather and I interviewed my dad and my uncle, so I was able to get their story, about their experience growing up, what they know, what my grandfather was to them, what my grandmother was to them,” Brown says.
“Through ancestry.com, though, I was able to go all the way back to my great, great, great grandfather, who was born in 1823 in Louisiana, and what I found out about him is that he actually worked for the Freedmen’s Bureau from 1865 to 1877,” Brown says. My great grandparents, who got married in 1889, according to the US Census, they were literate and able to write as early as 1910. They owned their own home and they owned their own farm, and to be able to see that type of progress in the early 1900s in Mississippi was just super eye-opening for me. So I’ve captured all of that, and was able to put that in the book while layering over 7,000 years of Black history.
(Photo by A. David Dahmer)
“In that story of struggle, there is progress. Trump is talking about illegal discrimination and restoring merit-based opportunity … My father and uncle, they talk about being in the cotton fields 12 hours a day only making $2.50 the entire day, while having to go into a hate-filled educational environment when they were desegregating the schools,” Brown continues. “It busts down everything that Trump is trying to push. My family was a hard-working family. They did it the right way. But regardless of that, simply because they were Black and there were these terrible Jim Crow laws, they were still second-class citizens.
“My grandfather didn’t vote for the first time until he was 66 years old, and that was because of the Voting Rights Act of 1965,” he adds. “To see my father and uncle having their story put into the book … I’ve seen another level of joy out of the two of them that I’ve never seen before because they participated in this book.”
The book also talks about Brown’s experiences growing up on the South Side of Madison.
“I’ve got a lot of Madison history in there,” says Brown, who was named one of Madison365’a most influential African-Americans in the state of Wisconsin back in 2016. “The desegregation that I was part of in 1984. I talk about leading DEI work in public schools and how, as of late, I’ve been attacked. So in the book, I take it all the way back and bring it into the current context.”
The forward of the book is written by Gloria Ladson-Billings, the former Kellner Family Distinguished Professor of Urban Education in the Department of Curriculum and Instruction and faculty affiliate in the Department of Educational Policy Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
“In her forward, it’s basically a lot of her story and her family history … which is very powerful,” Brown says.
“Strength Through Generations” is designed to be a professional development tool.
“At the end of the book, I have a series of self-reflective activities. So the book is actually designed to help people build and develop their cultural literacy, and that’s a two-step process, where you self-reflect on your own history and cultural background and experience while engaging in perspective, taking around learning about somebody else’s history and culture that is different than your own,” Brown says.
“I center my family story, I center Black history, and I center my story while engaging the reader through their own self-reflective activities as they’re reading the book. But then at the end, I actually have an exercise where they do a Venn diagram and they take in and compare and contrast my story and experience to theirs. Where is it different? What are the things that we have in common?”
Brown says that the book serves as a call to action and a “beacon of inspiration for a path forward together.”
“We’re able to look at things that we have in common, those are the things that bring us together, regardless of your racial background or your socio-economic background. It’s really a tool to help do that and bring people together, and it’s really an attempt to end the culture divide that we have, especially around the issue of race,” he says.
