Amos Brown, Medgar Evers and the 2,000-mile drive to meet MLK in SF

In the summer of 1956, two men piled into a 1955 Oldsmobile nicknamed the “blue goose” and drove 2,000 miles west, from their hometown of Jackson, Miss., to downtown San Francisco.

Amos Brown and Medgar Evers, activists who met in Mississippi amid the burgeoning civil rights movement, trekked across the country to attend the 47th annual NAACP convention, where the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. was scheduled to speak.

Last week marked the 67th anniversary of that historic gathering, which laid the groundwork for Brown’s lifelong commitment to social justice.

Today, Brown is president of the NAACP’s San Francisco Chapter and pastor of Third Baptist Church, the oldest Black church in San Francisco, the sanctuary of which Brown first entered during that inaugural trip to the West Coast.

Brown spoke to The Examiner last month , just days after returning from a trip to Jackson, for a memorial commemorating the 60th anniversary of Evers’ death. He was assassinated by a white supremacist in the driveway of his Jackson home.

Evers, a champion of civil rights and the NAACP’s first field secretary in Mississippi, was Brown’s mentor, friend and the reason he stepped foot in San Francisco.

“You reap what you sow,” Brown told The Examiner. “‘You don’t sow corn and get cabbage,’ says Paul. I thank God for what others have sown into me.”

Brown met Evers growing up in the depths of the Jim Crow South. Nearly 600 Black people were lynched in Mississippi from 1882 to 1968 — the most of any U.S. state, according to the NAACP.

“As a young 14-year-old boy, I was aware of all of that,” he said. “It was common sport for white supremacists to murder, to lynch Black folks. They were never brought to justice.”

He was 14 in 1955 when Emmett Till was murdered at the same age by a group of white men just an hour from Brown’s hometown. The killing, and the images of Till’s savagely mutilated corpse, drove Brown to Evers’ office, fuming with rage.

But Evers told him to channel his emotions into something productive. It was his “responsibility to be smart, strategic and do something that would teach my young friends how to fight this evil of race and injustice,” Brown recalled Evers saying. That advice pushed Brown to organize the NAACP’s first youth council later that fall.

Evers, who planned to travel west for the San Francisco convention, asked Brown’s mother if he could join him on his cross-country tour, so his newly-formed council could gain more exposure. His mother agreed as a prize for Brown organizing the committee.

67 years later, Brown remembers every stop along the way: Vicksburg, Miss., Shreveport, La., Dallas and Amarillo, Texas; Santa Fe, N.M.; Flagstaff, Ariz.; Needles — and finally through the Central Valley and up to the Bay Area.

“That was the first time I saw that much water,” he said.

The convention at the Civic Auditorium lasted from June 26 to July 1. Every day, Brown walked from a friend’s home at Fulton and Divisadero streets — he didn’t have enough money for a hotel — to meet the more than 1,000 other NAACP delegates from 35 states.

In addition to King, Brown met Thurgood Marshall, who gave the keynote address; Rosa Parks, a featured guest; and other leaders he described as “iconic personalities.”

King spoke Wednesday night, just weeks after he and the civil rights movement gained a vital victory in a landmark Supreme Court ruling — Browder v. Gayle, which declared that segregation on buses was unconstitutional. The decision resulted from months of protests during the Montgomery Bus Boycotts , led by King and sparked by Parks’ refusal to sit in the back of a bus.

Brown said he’ll never forget how King finished his address, discussing his dream that “the day will come when all of God’s children, from bass black to treble white, would be significant on the Constitution’s keyboard.”

Five years later, Brown was arrested alongside King during a sit-in at an Atlanta restaurant lunch counter. The following year, he was one of eight students to enroll in the only college course King ever taught, a social philosophy seminar at Morehouse College in Atlanta. He still has a copy of the handwritten note King wrote to him from the class and a list of the student roster.

Brown skipped the convention only once — to worship, for the first time, at Third Baptist Church’s service Sunday morning. He sat on the fourth pew “with rapt interest and attention” as Rev. Frederick Douglas Haynes — who became in 1945 the first Black person to run for the San Francisco Board of Supervisors — spoke from the pulpit.

Haynes lost that electoral race, but Brown said only because of racism and that many Black people at the time thought preachers shouldn’t be involved in the political process. Brown, who ran in 1995, went on to serve on the board from 1996 to 2001.

Brown returned to San Francisco in 1976, when he became pastor at Third Baptist — a position he’s held ever since, still sermonizing about many lessons that trace back to his first trip to San Francisco seven decades ago.

Under Brown’s guidance, the church has established youth programs for San Francisco’s Black community and has been a leader in helping Africans in need. With Brown at the helm, the church has sponsored more African refugees than any other local congregation in the country and raised hundreds of thousands of dollars for several crises on the continent.

Brown has also organized multiple youth outreach programs to Africa, including a 10-day fellowship to Ghana last year, the first of its kind launched by the NAACP.

But there’s still work to be done. Black people in San Francisco, he said, are “as it always has been, made to feel lonely.” Today, San Francisco’s Black population sits at 5.7%, down from 13% in 1970. Its median household income was $44,142 in 2021, by far the lowest of any racial group in The City.

Brown said recovery begins with reparations. Brown is one of 19 board members on California’s Reparations Task Force, a body that last week, submitted a lengthy document to the legislature outlining how the state can address the centuries of racism against the Black community.

Brown is also a member of San Francisco’s parallel reparations task force. The City’s panel was supposed to submit its recommendations to the board of supervisors last week, but the deadline was extended .

Brown called each committee the “last major opportunity to do the right thing and do what is practical.”