PARADOXICALLY, it all comes from being grounded. Roscoe Brown was raised in Washington, D.C., coming of age amid the Great Depression. He grew up in the shadow of the Lincoln Memorial (dedicated just two months after his birth), right there in the nation’s capital, perched between north and south.


His father, Roscoe Brown Sr., was part of Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s “Black Cabinet,” more formally, the Federal Council of Negro Affairs. Roscoe Sr. led the Public Health Service for this advisory group, which was coordinated by first lady Eleanor Roosevelt.


Brown attended Dunbar High School, a segregated school established in 1870 as the “Preparatory High School for Colored Youth.” It was, he says, a great academic environment, one that pushed students toward excellence. As a youngster, Brown also spent time at Howard University, a historically black school that, like Dunbar, had opened after the Civil War. There he met athletic director John Burr (for whom the gymnasium at Howard is now named). Burr had graduated from Springfield College in 1923. He spoke glowingly of his alma mater—and guided a number of promising African-American students to that idealistic little institution on Alden Street. “There was a cadre of maybe five or six of us from Washington,” Brown recalls. Coming north in the fall of 1939, Brown knew he would be in a significant minority. “There were about 15 or 16 African-Americans among a student body of about 650,” he recalls.


While by no means immune to the racism threaded through American society, Springfield College struck Brown as a rather progressive place. The very first student to receive a bachelor’s degree at the school had been an African- American, William Beckett in 1906. (Prior to that, the school had granted certificates, not degrees, and Beckett—as fate would have it—was alphabetically first in his class.) Years later, Burr had thrived at Springfield in the 1920s. And just two years ahead of Brown was Harold Amos, a brilliant student who would go on to teach at Harvard Medical


School for almost 50 years.


Brown found the campus to be a welcoming place. “We were a very small minority, but because of the College’s reputation and philosophy, they didn’t treat us any different than anybody else,” he said. Brown got along well with white roommate Kenneth McEwen, and immersed himself in campus activities—playing varsity football and lacrosse, and being elected treasurer of his class.


The faculty, he says, were quite supportive. He recalls with particular fondness chemistry professor Charles Rutenber, and the husband and wife team of Ed Hickox (basketball coach) and Gena Hickox (professor of English). “She would invite us over to their house, where we would have tea and talk about literature,” he remembers.


“The moving ahead was progressive, but not overly aggressive,” Brown says. “For example, when the prom came about we had to make special initial arrangements as to who would dance with whose date. Some whites we didn’t even ask, but some we’d say, sure, let’s do that….It was a positive environment largely because we were not inhibited in our striving for excellence.”


In that sense, the mission was emphatically accomplished. Roscoe Brown wound up being the valedictorian of the Class of 1943.


A glance at yearbooks from that era shows some of the playfulness we connect with college days. There are pictures from “Stunt Night,” the then all-male student body dressed as women for “Varsity Club Beauties,” and reference to a dance called “The Horrible Hop.” Next to the senior photos and lists of club/athletic affiliations are nicknames, many of them now amusingly transporting us to another era: “Bugle,” “Stub,” “Muscles,” “Buck,” “Skipper,” etc. (A dapper-looking Roscoe Brown is dubbed “Brownie.”)


But there is also a clear sense in these yearbooks that this was a serious time. The smiles, when present at all, are tight and tense. There is an almost palpable air of tension. The preparation for war is apparent. “I think it was a weight on


Brown’s Senior Yearbook Entry TRIANGLE 1 Vol. 83, No. 3 Continued on next page 7


Brown with his P-51D, “Bunnie,” (named after his daughter)


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