Black Print with a White Carnation: Mildred Brown and the Omaha Star Newspaper, 1938-1989

Introduction

1 Introduction On June 1, 1984, Mildred Brown slowly walked onto the stage dais of the Red Lion Inn, the finest downtown hotel in Omaha, Nebraska. She looked out at the multitude of white and black citizens facing her and said, “Am I dreaming?” Standing at the podium, serenaded by the sounds of the famous Preston Love Sr. Band, she looked radiant in her scarlet red gown and shimmering silver sequined evening jacket. Her trademark oversized white carnation corsage decorated her left shoulder. Brown, the cofounder, owner, publisher, and editor of the Omaha Star black newspaper, was the honored guest of 470 residents of the city of Omaha, most of whom were from northern Omaha, better known as the Near North Side. Harold Andersen, the white editor of the mainstream Omaha World-Herald newspaper, and Ben Gray, a local black television talk show host, served as the dinner’s emcees. The men introduced each other to the interracial crowd. Gray incorrectly introduced Harold Andersen as Harold Washington, who at that time was Chicago’s current and first black mayor. Andersen covered Gray’s faux pas with a clever quip. He asked the television reporter if he wanted to meet his wife, Marian Andersen, as in Marian Anderson, the black operatic singer. The audience responded with a few nervous chuckles and laughs. Brown’s former second husband, Noel Maximilian “Max” Brownell; her brother Bennie Brown Sr.; her nephew Bennie Brown Jr.; and her niece Marguerita Washington nodded approvingly at the head table. Ruth Harris Kellogg, Brown’s beloved foster daughter, was not present; she had died seven months prior to the festive event. Her voice would not be among the videotaped speeches or thirty-five minutes of individual tributes to Brown. 2 Introduction Mayor Mike Boyle joined Brown at the podium and presented her with a “key to the city” plaque. The award added one more accolade to the 150 awards she had amassed during her lifetime. After the applause died down and the crowd started to disperse, Bennie Brown Jr. stood up from his chair and strode out of the hotel that Saturday evening, “impressed that his aunt was so highly thought of in Omaha.”1 Brown was not just respected by the residents of Omaha; she was also the black matriarch of Omaha’s Near North Side, the historically black part of town. She used her newspaper, the Omaha Star, as an activist tool to provide a voice for the black community and to conduct diplomatic forms of communication between the black and white residents of Omaha. For more than fifty years Brown and the Star, which most citizens of Omaha saw as synonymous, sought to uplift the black community with positive weekly news and successfully challenged racial discrimination, unfair employment practices in North Omaha, restrictive housing covenants, Omaha’s public segregated school system, and the city’s urban renewal. The iconoclastic female leader accomplished this impressive feat by nurturing, challenging , and speaking for her black readership from the moment she cofounded the Omaha Star on July 9, 1938, until the minute she died on November 2, 1989. Posthumously, Mildred Brown holds the record for operating the longest running black newspaper founded by a black woman in the United States. This is an even more amazing feat when considering that all the other twentieth century’s black women newspaper owners inherited their weeklies from their husbands. Today, what she referred to as “my paper” remains the only black newspaper in the state of Nebraska. Brown accomplished her lifetime feat as a result of a strong family foundation and through a variety of strategies: deliberately engaging with the black community, employing the politics of respectability, learning business through practical application and education, supporting community collective activism, encouraging racial solidarity, and changing strategies to fit the times. Her story illustrates a larger history dating from the nineteenth-century era of Introduction 3 Reconstruction and Jim Crow to the twentieth century’s Great Migration , World Wars I and II, the Red Scare, the civil rights and black power movements, desegregation, and urban renewal. This project offers an examination of African American history during a century of political and social events and an overall view of the impact of the black press through a black newspaper woman’s narrative. Mildred Brown’s story begins with her interracial common-law family in nineteenth-century Morgan County, Alabama. William and Sopharina Breeding, Mildred...