WISDOM OF ELDERS ECHOES FOR THE AGES

Hey have sat at segregated lunch counters and stood in picket lines. They have marched on Washington and for Black Lives Matter. They have organized protests that created enduring legacies and been jailed alongside Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. They have bee

“Lift Every Voice and Sing,” written by brothers James Weldon Johnson and John Rosamond Johnson, began as a poem in 1900 for schoolchildren. Before long, the song spread across the nation at NAACP events, within Black churches, and in community meetings, gaining prominence each time it was sung. Known as the “Black National Anthem,” “Lift Every Voice and Sing” is a triumphant story that chronicles and acknowledges the past while marching forward toward freedom.

The Rev. Amos Brown is the embodiment of history. A champion of the American civil rights movement, Brown has experienced firsthand what most have read in books. Born in 1941 in Jackson, Miss., Brown was a few months older than 14yearold Emmett Till, who was brutally killed in Money, Miss., in 1955 — an hour away from Brown’s home. The anger surrounding Till’s murder sparked a movement for justice among the Black community, and magazine images of the boy’s mutilated face led a terrified Brown to the Mississippi field office of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People and its new field secretary, Medgar Evers.

“I told him how upset I was, and just how evil those men were,” Brown said. “And he said to me, ‘Amos, don’t just be sad, mad and upset. Let’s be smart.’ ”

Now 80, Brown has dedicated his life to following Evers’ advice and to the enrichment and liberation of not only Black Americans, but Black people around the world. At age 15, he started the first NAACP Youth Council in Jackson, and in 1960 Brown was arrested alongside the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. at an Atlanta lunch counter sitin. Two years later, as a student at Morehouse College in Atlanta, he was one of eight students in the only college class taught by the civil rights leader.

Today, Brown is the president of the NAACP’s San Francisco branch, and has served as pastor of Third Baptist Church of San Francisco in the Fillmore district since 1976, advocating for the rights of all people regardless of race, religion and sexual orientation. In 2008, when a measure to ban samesex marriages was on the California ballot, he was one of the few Black ministers to oppose the measure. Recently, he was also appointed to the city’s African American Reparations Advisory Committee.

“They say in Mississippi, ‘God gave us two eyes to see, two ears to hear and one mouth to speak,’ ” Brown says. “And the more you look, listen, speak less and do the right thing, the better we all will be.”