Elaine Brown (born 2 March 1943) was an African-American prison rights activist and the chairwoman of the Black Panther Party.
Biography[]
Elaine Brown was born in North Philadelphia, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania on 2 March 1943, and she was raised by her single mother. She attended the University of California Los Angeles and became a member of the Black Panther Party following the April 1968 assassination of Martin Luther King Jr.. Brown became a member of the party's central committee as Minister of Information in 1971, and she unsuccessfully ran for the Oakland City Council in 1973. She later wrote in her memoir that she suffered from intense sexism because she was accused of "eroding Black manhood" with her leadership. In 1974, Brown's fired bookkeeper Betty Van Patter was murdered after threatening to reveal the BPP's tax problems and doctored books, and Brown and the Black Panther leadership were suspected of ordering her murder. In 1977, Brown managed Lionel Wilson's campaign to become the first African-American Mayor of Oakland, and, after Regina Davis' beating that same year, she left the Black Panthers. She continued to be an activist for black nationalism, and she lived in France from 1990 to 1996 and then in Atlanta, Georgia, mounting a failed GPUS campaign for Mayor of Brunswick, Georgia and for the presidency in 2008.