RIP Jim Brown, Your Legacy is Mixed, Yet Memorable
Although some of the participants, including Brown, reportedly saw the summit’s purpose as persuading Ali to accept a government deal — he would perform boxing exhibitions for U.S. troops instead of serving in the war — Ali refused to go along with such a deal and the summit participants stood with him, according to Ali’s biographer Jonathan Eig, among others.
In later years, he worked to curb gang violence in Los Angeles and in 1988 founded the Amer-I-Can Foundation, a California-based program to help disadvantaged inner-city youth and ex-convicts, which still exists.
But Brown’s legacy as a pioneering activist and athlete would shine more brightly were it not for his arrests for abusing women, including accusations that he had thrown a girlfriend off a balcony.
When he refused to attend domestic violence counseling for smashing his wife Monique Brown’s car with a shovel in 1999 and threatening to kill her, a Los Angeles judge sentenced him to six months in jail. Not good.
But, just as bewildering for many was his fulsome support for Donald Trump in 2016, followed by his denunciation of civil rights legend John Lewis, then a Georgia Democratic congressman, for calling Trump “illegitimate.”
Many wondered whether Brown had lost his mind. But, for those of us who had followed Brown’s evolution over the years, it was just the latest example of his long-running conservatism — in the model of such Black self-help leaders as Booker T. Washington or the Nation of Islam’s “Do for self” founder Elijah Muhammad.
In that spirit, it was not surprising to see the aging fullback sitting with Kanye West in their historic, if bizarre, 2018 Oval Office meeting with then-President Trump. Birds of a feather do flock together.
In the end, Brown’s legacy of helping young men “feel more like men,” as Ossie Davis famously praised Malcolm X, unfortunately fell short of helping women to feel more safe.
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(E-mail Clarence Page at cpage@chicagotribune.com.)
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