PHILADELPHIA— Dr. Amos C. Brown’s entry into the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) came shortly after the brutal death of Emmett Till.
Outraged by Till’s murder in 1955 by a group of White men, a 14-year-old Brown turned to Medgar Evers, who eventually helped him to establish the organization’s first Youth Council.
“I went to Medgar Evers because he was a friend of our family,” said Brown of the Mississippi civil rights icon who was later gunned down in the driveway of his home in 1963 by White supremacist Byron De La Beckwith. “I told him I wanted to do something about what those bad, evil White men did to Emmett Till.”
Brown, who now pastors the historic Third Baptist Church of San Francisco, was instrumental in paving the way for the future involvement of thousands of young people in the storied history of the 106-year-old civil rights organization.
“The major media has lied on us,” said Brown, of youth involvement in the NAACP across the years. “They have not told the truth.”
He said that, two years before four Black students at North Carolina Agricultural and Technical State University integrated lunch counters in downtown Greensboro with their successful sit-ins, NAACP youth leaders had already been on the front lines waging a “sit-down” movement in Oklahoma City.
“We must dispel the lie that the student movement began in Greensboro, N.C.,” Brown told thousands of participants who gathered at this year’s NAACP convention. “If truth be told, we have not told our story right because too many adults have been delinquent in passing from one generation to the next what God has done for us.”
