(born March 2, 1943) is an American prison activist, writer, singer, and former Black Panther Party chairwoman who is based in Oakland, California. Brown briefly ran for the Green Party presidential nomination in 2008…
Elaine Brown grew up in the ghetto of North Philadelphia, with a single, working mother Dorothy Clark and an absent father. Despite desperate poverty, Brown’s mother worked to provide for Elaine’s private schooling, music lessons, and nice clothing. She studied classical piano and ballet for many years in her youth at a predominantly white experimental elementary school. As a young woman, Elaine had few African-American friends…After graduating from Philadelphia High School for Girls, a public preparatory school for gifted young women, she studied at Temple University for less than a semester. After withdrawing from Temple, Brown moved to Los Angeles, California to try being a professional songwriter. While in Los Angeles Brown enrolled in the University of California Los Angeles in September 1968. She later went on to briefly attend Mills College and Southwestern University of Law.
Upon arriving in California with little money and few contacts, Brown got work as a cocktail waitress at the strip club The Pink Pussycat. While working at the Pink Pussycat she met Jay Richard Kennedy, a married white fiction writer, and the two became lovers. Kennedy was the first person to politicize and radicalize Brown. Because of thorough education on the Civil Rights Movement, Capitalism, and Communism, that Kennedy gave her, Brown became involved with the Black Liberation Movement. After living together for a brief time in the Hollywood Hills Hotels, the pair parted ways. After this pivotal relationship, Brown’s involvement in politics grew and she began working for the radical newspaper Harambee. Soon after, Brown became the first representative of the Black Student Alliance to the Black Congress in California. In April 1968, after the assassination of Martin Luther King Junior, she attended her first meeting of the Los Angeles chapter of the Black Panther Party…
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