SAN FRANCISCO — Amos Brown’s office is a civil rights museum. History covers every wall and desktop.
Anticipation accompanies the walk up two flights of stairs at the Third Baptist Church, built in the 1950s. You know what awaits: photographs of the Rev. Dr. Brown with Nelson Mandela, four U.S. presidents, the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and President Russell M. Nelson of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.
But you don’t know what you don’t know. The surprises begin just inside the outer door, yards from his desk.
There on a wall is a poster with the faces of dozens of Freedom Riders arrested in June 1961 in Jackson, Mississippi. History comes alive as the Rev. Dr. Brown’s finger reaches out and touches the poster just below a name under a mugshot.
He’s pointing at a younger version of himself, a college student who will grow up to be honored on Sunday as “The Lion of the Third Baptist Church.”
‘The Lion of the Third’
The image captures forever the defiant stare of a 20-year-old Brown. It’s the stare of a civil rights hero mentored as a Mississippi teenager by Medgar Evers. It’s the nonviolent defiance of a future Baptist preacher schooled by the Rev. Dr. King Jr.
The image also captures the developing soul of “the Lion of the Third.” That’s what a preacher called the Rev. Dr. Brown at the Third Baptist Church here on Sunday afternoon at the end of his half century as the church’s pastor.
You see, lions aren’t born with the roars that can be heard for up to five miles. Those who aspire to leaders emulate their mentor’s roar, according to Sunday’s afternoon sermon by the Rev. Dr. Brown’s nephew, the Rev. Anthony Trufant of Brooklyn’s Emmanuel Baptist Church.
The Rev. Dr. Brown learned to roar from Evers, James Baldwin, Benjamin Mays, Booker Washington and many more, the Rev. Trufant said. “He learned to roar, and he developed his own roar.”
The sound resonated through San Francisco and nationally and internationally.
California Gov. Gavin Newsom came to honor Brown on Sunday; they once served together on the San Francisco board of supervisors, which is the city council. The mayor of Oakland, Barbara Lee, and former San Francisco Mayor Willie Brown also showed up.
On Saturday, current Mayor Daniel Lurie headlined an event to rename the street outside the church “Amos Brown Way.”
“Reverend Brown, your name belongs on the street because your life has shaped it step by step for nearly half a century,” he said.
You see, Amos Cleophilus Brown is a legend, and not just because he worked with the pioneer Evers and walked and went to jail with the Rev. Dr. King Jr.
He preached Jesus Christ to the apartheid president of South Africa, build interfaith bridges to Jews and Latter-day Saints and led the members of Third Baptist on the corner of a McAllister and Amos Brown Way in a manner that raised up new lions.
A leader known for inspiring action
The Rev. Dr. Brown preaches a vigorous gospel. Your feet should move as you pray, because Christ has a work for you. And the Rev. Dr. Brown will call you to it, the way he called the Rev. Dr. Lawrence Carter the day of the Columbine shooting in 1999 and asked him, “What are you going to do about it?”
The Rev. Dr. Carter was flabbergasted, he said during Sunday’s services for the Rev. Dr. Brown. He sat dumbfounded by the impromptu commission for an hour, until the Spirit moved him to merge the philosophies of non-violence of Mahatma Ghandi and the Rev. Dr. King Jr.
That new ministry took the Rev. Dr. Carter to 30 countries and eventually led to the creation of the Morehouse College Gandhi-King-Mandela Peace Prize. He awarded the inaugural prize to President Nelson in 2023.
“What you are, Amos, shouts so loudly that there is never any doubt that you belong to Jesus,” the Rev. Dr. Carter said during Sunday’s afternoon service.
Newsom and former San Francisco Mayor Willie Brown said Sunday that the Rev. Dr. Brown (no relation) pushed politicians for justice just as hard. He once interrupted a press conference held by South African President P.W. Botha.
“Mr. President, when are you going to topple the wall of apartheid?” the Rev. Dr. Brown said to a stunned Botha, according to the Rev. Trufant’s Sunday afternoon sermon.
Brown also testified at the Senate confirmation hearings for Clarence Thomas. He testified that Thomas was unfit to sit on the Supreme Court. The chairman of the hearings, Joe Biden, said it was the Rev. Dr. Brown who convinced him to vote against Thomas.
But the Rev. Dr. Brown also has been a healer and a convener.
“Amos walked across the lines of all the faiths in San Francisco,” said Willie Brown, who noted that the Rev. Dr. Brown was the first to go to the Jewish synagogue. “Amos, for me, is a legendary figure in every sense of the word.”
On Saturday, after the band stopped playing for the street renaming, a reporter asked the Rev. Dr. Brown about his legacy. He said his philosophy for the past half-century at Third Baptist was to keep the church focused on service.
“An old preacher in Mississippi once said, ‘You’ve never seen a mule kick and pull at the same time.’”
After the Thomas Senate hearings, he also called for reconciliation in a way that led speakers to honor him as a leader as prophetic as his namesake in the Old Testament.
“It’s time for our country to stop talking about ‘left wing’ and ‘right wing,’” Amos Brown said then. “We need two wings to soar.”
How Emmett Till’s death galvanized Amos Brown
The Rev. Dr. Brown was a 14-year-old boy when white men tortured and murdered 11-year-old Emmett Till in 1955 for talking to a white woman in a Mississippi store.
The young Brown was distraught and angry. Evers validated his dismay but advised him to be smart. He suggested the teenager launch what became the first NAACP Youth Council.
It was a momentous decision. Young Brown began to find his purpose in life; white supremacists began to target him. Eventually, an FBI committee compiled a 10-page dossier of Brown that stamped the young man as an “agitator,” a label he came to bear proudly.
Evers rewarded him by taking the 15-year-old on a 2,100-mile road trip to San Francisco in his 1955 Oldsmobile for the 1956 NAACP convention.
It was here that young Brown met the giant, the Rev. Dr. King Jr.
“I believe that a day will come when all God’s children, from bass black to treble white, will be significant on the constitution’s keyboard,” the teenager heard the loudest lion say.
“It was an incredible speech and from that day forward I was in touch with him,” the Rev. Dr. Brown once said.
Losing the lions who taught him to roar
He also met Rosa Parks and Thurgood Marshall and Roy Wilkins.
It was here, too, that Brown stole away from the convention to attend Sunday services at the iconic Third Baptist Church, which had been founded in 1852 as the first Black Baptist church in the West.
He sat on the fourth row, which is where he said he now will sit after retiring from the pulpit and receiving emeritus status during Sunday’s afternoon service.
The young Brown worked with Evers all over Mississippi until 1963, when he was a college student who had to stay at Morehouse College to catch up on studies he’d interrupted to join protests.
Evers called him to join him, but Brown said he couldn’t. Evers was assassinated by Mississippi white supremacist in June 1963. Brown marched behind the Rev. Dr. King Jr. to the funeral in Jackson, Mississippi.
Police on horses attacked them.
The Rev. Dr. Brown said Sunday that the prized possession in his museum-office is an oil portrait of the Rev. Dr. King Jr. He tried to donate it to the Crozer Theological Seminary in 1965, but the president and dean told him his mentor was too radical for the school’s donors.
Brown was hurt. He couldn’t understand why anyone considered the Rev. Dr. King Jr. a radical.
“He was America’s best friend on this issue of race and non-violence,” he said with the conviction of someone who was one of eight students the Rev. Dr. King taught in a seminary on social philosophy at Crozer in 1962.
When an assassin killed the Rev. Dr. King Jr. in 1968, Crozer’s president and dean asked Brown to consider donating the portrait. He declined.
“It puts in context and gives concrete expression to the fact what is done to true prophets — in their lifetime they are rejected by the masses and once they leave, the masses want to garnish and worship their tombs," he said standing in his museum-office.
Arrests after sit-ins, sleep-ins, kneel-ins and wade-ins
The Rev. Dr. Brown said he lost count of how many times he was arrested. There were sit-ins at lunch counters and the Jackson Municipal Zoo and sleep-ins in motel lobbies.
He met his wife, who was praised as “Lady” Jane repeatedly on Sunday, at a kneel-in at the white First Baptist church in Atlanta.
There was even a wade-in at Tybee Beach on an island in Georgia that was reserved for whites. There is a photograph of the young Brown in his bathing suit with a policeman.
The reputation that grew up around the Freedom Rider preceded him to San Francisco before he returned to Third Baptist to become its pastor in 1976 and begin developing the voices of more young lions and lionesses.
Robert Webster was fresh out of the military and looking for his purpose in life at the Third Baptist Church when the Rev. Dr. Brown arrived.
“He came out of that Martin Luther King cut,” Webster said. “I didn’t have any real direction. Rev. Brown gave me that. He made a real impression on me. He gave me something special. He gave me an opportunity to become my best self.”
The new pastor encouraged the younger man to deepen his education and become more active in the church. Webster is a deacon at the church.
Tributes to the Rev. Dr. Brown
The young lion replacing the Rev. Dr. Brown as the Third Baptist Church’s new senior pastor is the Rev. Devon Jerome Crawford.
“This is a high, holy moment for our church,” he said of Sunday’s morning worship service and afternoon celebration designating the Rev. Dr. Brown as pastor emeritus. “We lift our collective voices and our hearts to say, ‘Thank you.’”
Gov. Newsom called the Rev. Dr. Brown a person who has stood up always to advance the cause of justice and who made an extraordinary contribution.
“It’s a remarkable life you have led,” he said. “You’re a man of courage, a man of mission. You have certainly shown us the way.”
The NAACP’s chairman of the board of directors, Leon Russell, said the Rev. Dr. Brown will not be allowed to be idle.
“The most important thing Amos provides to us is context and history,” Russell said. “... As you take on the title of pastor emeritus of Third Baptist, you are still chaplain of the executive committee of the national board of the NAACP.”
“The lion still roars,” added the Rev. Trufant.
Others said he has been a burden-bearer and had borne a shepherd’s heart.
“This is a sacred occasion,” said the Rev. Portia Osborne, assistant minister at Third Baptist.
She called the Rev. Dr. Brown a servant-leader.
What Elder Matthew S. Holland said
Elder Matthew S. Holland, a General Authority Seventy of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, attended the Sunday services on assignment from the First Presidency, which is led by President Nelson. He was joined by Elder Peter M. Johnson, also a General Authority Seventy and a member of the church’s North America West area presidency.
“The world is improved because of the inspired leadership of Dr. Amos C. Brown,” Elder Holland said.
“The greatest compliment I could pay another man,” he added, “is that he has invited me and helped me become a better Christian. The Rev. Dr. Amos C. Brown has helped me become a better Christian.”
The president of the San Francisco chapter of the NAACP, Dr. Jonathan Butler, said, “Pastor Brown, your fingerprints are on me, on my life, on my leadership, and all the good I have done. Thank you for the lessons you taught and the fire you lit.”
The Rev. Dr. Carter of Morehouse College said the Rev. Dr. Brown was “a Black baptist to your bones.”
He also said his friend had marched, picketed, protested, published and preached to make an America for all.
“You have borne the heat of the day as a good shepherd,” he said, “and a courageous warrior for righteousness.”
