Early Life and Political Career
He was born in Washington, D.C., and was raised in Harlem, New York, in a middle-class family. He was a member of the African-American social and philanthropic organization, Jack and Jill of America, where he met many African-American friends. Brown attended Hunter College Elementary School and Rhodes Preparatory School. His father managed the Theresa Hotel in Harlem, where Ron lived growing up. His best friend John R. Nailor moved into the penthouse while a student at Rhodes. Nailor was one of the other few black students who attended Rhodes Prep. As a child, he appeared in an advertisement for Pepsi-Cola, one of the first to be targeted specifically towards the African-American community.
While at Middlebury College, Middlebury, Vermont, Ron Brown became the first African-American member of Sigma Phi Epsilon, a national men's collegiate fraternity. Brown joined the army in 1962, after graduating from Middlebury, and served in South Korea and Europe, the same year he married Alma Arrington. After being discharged in 1967, Brown joined the National Urban League, a leading economic equality group in the United States. Meanwhile, Brown enrolled in law school at St. John's University and obtained a degree in 1970.
Read more about this topic: Ron Brown (U.S. Politician)
Famous quotes containing the words early, life, political and/or career:
“...to many a mother’s heart has come the disappointment of a loss of power, a limitation of influence when early manhood takes the boy from the home, or when even before that time, in school, or where he touches the great world and begins to be bewildered with its controversies, trade and economics and politics make their imprint even while his lips are dewy with his mother’s kiss.”
—J. Ellen Foster (1840–1910)
“Look, there’s nothing wrong with people being happy, but there’s more to life than turning on and screwing to Ravel’s Bolero.”
—Blake Edwards (b. 1922)
“Currently, U.S. society has been encouraged by its political and subsidized mass-media intelligentsia to view U.S. life as a continual “morning in America” paradise, where the only social problems occur in the inner cities. Psychologists call this denial.”
—Ishmael Reed (b. 1938)
“Work-family conflicts—the trade-offs of your money or your life, your job or your child—would not be forced upon women with such sanguine disregard if men experienced the same career stalls caused by the-buck-stops-here responsibility for children.”
—Letty Cottin Pogrebin (20th century)