Last week’s Democratic National Convention in Chicago was all about unlikely travel, especially for the two people currently at the top of the ballot.
The life stories of Kamala Harris and Tim Walz – and the improbability that the daughter of biracial immigrants and a former high school football coach could one day have a real chance of becoming president and vice president of the United States – made Troy Brown Sr. reflect on his own unlikely path to the podium at a Democratic convention 24 years earlier.
Brown, a longtime Greenwood resident, was 37 at the time and making his second failed attempt at political office. The year before, he had finished a wide third in a three-candidate primary for lieutenant governor.
Rather than being humbled by his 13% result in 1999, the indefatigable Brown set his sights even higher in 2000. He decided to challenge Trent Lott, then the U.S. Senate Majority Leader and one of the most powerful politicians in Washington.
Although the GOP did not yet have full power in Mississippi, Brown had no chance of winning. The Democratic National Committee did not want to invest in his campaign. It advised him early on to get security – he was black and had already received some nasty threatening letters – but the DNC did not provide him with any money to pay for it.
An African-American car dealer in Canton lent Brown a car for the campaign. The candidate improvised for his protection. “I had a bat in the back seat of my car. That was my security.”
He says he drove 200,000 miles in less than a year and visited every county in the state at least twice. Living on a tight budget, he didn’t have the means to buy housing everywhere he went. “I slept in parking lots.”
But he knew that what he was doing was historic: he was the first black man since Reconstruction to represent a major party in Mississippi in a national election, and he thought that this would earn him a speech at the Democratic National Convention in Los Angeles, where Al Gore was to be officially nominated for the presidential election against George W. Bush.
Donna Brazile, Gore’s African-American campaign manager, initially rejected Brown’s request. But a second letter, this time from Brown’s wife Curressia, made Brazile change her mind. Curressia threatened to hold a press conference on the steps of the Capitol in Jackson on the night of Gore’s speech at the convention, denouncing the hypocrisy of Democrats’ claims that they are more inclusive than Republicans.
On the third day of the convention, Brown had five minutes at the podium. It was not the best time to broadcast. A video of his speech shows many empty seats in front of him in what was then the Staples Center.
Brown has a penchant for the theatrical. A year later, he walked the hundred miles from Itta Bena to Jackson to deliver a letter to the state college board protesting conditions at Mississippi Valley State University, where he had formerly worked.
At the national convention, he took the stage with a wooden staff in his hand and his remarks were inspired by Moses from the Old Testament and civil rights martyr Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.
Brown told convention attendees that he, too, had been “to the top of the mountain” and seen from there a “new Mississippi” – prosperous, healthy and racially united.
“Together we will reach the new Mississippi, and when we get there, we, blacks and whites and all Mississippians, will join hands and say, ‘First at last, first at last. Thank God, Mississippi is first at last.'”
Brown was nice to the DNC and cooperated in editing his speech to include endorsements for Gore and his vice presidential candidate, Joe Lieberman, which Brown had planned to omit because he was still angry over what he perceived as the presidential candidate’s dismissal of Gore during a campaign appearance in Jackson. The DNC gave Brown’s campaign $16,000 in his final month.
It wasn’t nearly a difference. Lott polled more than twice as high as his Democratic challenger in November.
Brown, who has since lost about a half-dozen state and local elections, says he went into all of his campaigns – even the ones that seemed the most far-fetched – expecting to pull off an upset victory. For him, however, winning is not about getting the most votes. His main goal was to get his message out.
He challenged Trent Lott because Brown felt the Delta was being neglected. He took on established black politicians in the state because he felt they were more concerned with playing the victim than working for progress.
When Brown reflects on his time on the party conference stage nearly a quarter of a century ago, his sense of awe at how far he had come in his life is most palpable.
His father was an alcoholic who was violent towards Brown’s mother and the two sons watched in fear. Once, when Brown was a teenager, he had enough and beat his father during one of these incidents. His father got a butcher knife from the kitchen and slashed Brown across the face, nearly costing him an eye.
Because Brown has dyslexia, he was placed in special education classes with children who were severely mentally disabled until high school. When he arrived at Rust College in Holly Springs, “I didn’t have an ACT test that would have qualified me to drive a dump truck.”
But he persevered, earned his bachelor’s and master’s degrees, raised four hardworking, successful children with his wife, and challenged some of the – as he describes them – “thugs in politics.”
The most important lesson he wants to teach is that every life, no matter how it begins, can be redeemed, he says.
“I want people to know that no matter how bad their life has been in the past, you can save it. You can make a positive contribution.”
– Contact Tim Kalich at 662-581-7243 or [email protected].
VIDEO: Click HERE to watch Troy Brown Sr.’s five-minute speech at the 2000 Democratic National Convention, starting at 1:18:25.