Mildred Brown - Early Life and Family

Early Life and Family

Mildred Brown was born in Bessemer, Alabama in 1905 to Rev. and Mrs. Bennie J. Brown, a prominent African-American family. Her mother was a teacher. They encouraged her education. In 1931 Brown graduated from Miles College (then called Miles Memorial Teachers College), an historically black college (HBCU) founded in Birmingham, Alabama by the Christian Methodist Episcopal Church (CME Church).

Brown worked as a teacher in Birmingham, where she met and married S. Edward Gilbert, a pharmacy graduate of Howard University. They moved to Chicago, where Brown studied at Chicago Normal College, and then to Des Moines, where she took journalism at Drake University. Brown started in journalism and started selling ads and writing news at the Silent Messenger in Sioux City, Iowa, where Gilbert was editor.

At the invitation of a friend who invited them to his paper, in 1937 they moved to Omaha. Initially Brown worked as advertising manager.

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