LEAVES Convocation - Elaine Brown

The Lincoln University Division of Student Success presents the LEAVES Convocation featuring Elaine Brown. Thursday, October 4, at 12:30 p.m., in the International Cultural Center. Free and open to the public. 

Evening Discussion for Students, Faculty & Staff
Thursday, October 4, 2018, 7 p.m.
Mary Dod Brown Memorial Chapel

Elaine Brown Bio

Elaine Brown is a former leader of the Black Panther Party, as Minister of Information and Chairman.  She is the author of A Taste of Power and The Condemnation of Little B.  A Taste of Power was optioned in 2017 by Robbie Brenner Productions (Dallas Buyers Club) with The Firm Entertainment for production of a feature film.

Elaine is presently co-authoring For Reasons of Race and Belief, The Trials of Jamil Al-Amin (H. Rap Brown) with Karima Al-Amin, and she is completing the nonfiction book Melba and Al, A Story of Black Love in Jim Crow America).  She is the Editor of Messages to Our Brothers and Sisters on the Other Side of the Wall, a collection of autobiographical essays by black prisoners in New Mexico, published by the New Mexico Department of African American Affairs (2007).

Elaine is Executive Director of the Michael Lewis Legal Defense Committee, supporting the legal appeal of Lewis (“Little B”), who, arrested in 1997 in Atlanta, Georgia, at the age of 13 for a murder he did not commit, was convicted and sentenced as an adult to life in prison, where he remains.

Elaine is CEO of the non-profit organization Oakland & the World Enterprises, Inc., dedicated to launching and sustaining for-profit businesses for cooperative-ownership by formerly incarcerated and other people facing monumental social barriers to economic survival.  The organization acquired a ¾-acre property in West Oakland, California, where it has established its first business, an urban farm, and is developing the property further for other businesses and 79, 100% affordable housing units, projected for ground-breaking by the end of 2018.

Elaine has been Executive Director and Founder of the non-profit education corporation Fields of Flowers; Co-Founder of Mothers Advocating Juvenile Justice and the National Alliance for Radical Prison Reform; a member of the Steering Committee of the December 9th Georgia and International Prisoners’ Rights Movement; member of the Kenneth Harding, Jr., Foundation and the Executive Committee of the Justice 4 Mario Woods Coalition, advocating for justice in the San Francisco police murders of Harding and Woods.

Elaine lived in France for seven years before returning to the U.S. in 1996, and has traveled extensively elsewhere in the world, from China, North Korea, Vietnam, Cuba, Algeria to Turkey, Germany, Italy, Russia, Argentina, Uruguay, Costa Rica, Belize.  She studied classical piano for many years, including at the Philadelphia Conservatory of Music, and has recorded two albums of original songs, one for Motown records, Until We’re Free, and her 1969 album, Seize the Time, which includes “The Black Panther Party National Anthem,” (The Meeting), re-released in 2007 as a CD by Warner Bros., and now on iTunes.

Elaine grew up in the ghettos of North Philadelphia, is a “Distinguished Graduate” of the Philadelphia High School for Girls, and attended Temple University, UCLA, Mills College and Southwestern University School of Law.  She has lectured at colleges and universities throughout world, and her papers have been acquired by Emory University.  She is the mother of one, her daughter Ericka Abram, and currently resides in Oakland, California.