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Tampa Icon Abe Brown Hangs Up One Hat

Tribune photo by JULIE BUSCH

Brown has been a constant in the community. As one official put it: “There are few people in this community who have the integrity, the compassion and the outright love of people that Abe does.”

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By MICHELLE BEARDEN | The Tampa Tribune

Published: December 23, 2007

TAMPA - Coach wasn't putting up with anything from Al Barnes. The teenager knew that when he saw Abe Brown on the porch, talking to his mama.

Al, a senior at Middleton High School, had walked out of football practice that day. He didn't feel like doing all the tackling drills Coach had ordered. He told his teammates he was sick and going home. And he wasn't ever coming back.

But Brown — who says a quitter never wins and a winner never quits — wasn't finished with Al.

"He had this reddish hair, and it always seemed like there was smoke coming out of his head," recalls Barnes, now 69. "I saw the smoke. He told me I was a phony and go put my uniform back on."

Today, Barnes is a retiree, having coached and taught in Hillsborough County schools for 40 years. He would have never won a football scholarship to Fort Valley State University in Georgia, he says, never have earned his degree if Brown hadn't come to his porch and set him straight.

So the first thing he did after graduating from college was go to Brown's home. I used to hate you, he told his former coach. But now I love you and want to thank you. You didn't just teach me how to play football. You taught me how to be a man.

"I thought he'd be all flattered by that," Barnes recollects with a chuckle. "Instead, he just looked me in the eye and said, 'Don't thank me. You just go out and help another kid.'

"That's a message I've carried with me my whole life."

That's how it is with Abe Brown, Tampa's quiet crusader. Be a giver, he says, not a taker. Live by example.

And he doesn't figure being 80 years old is any excuse to stop. Come Dec. 31, he'll step down as senior pastor of First Baptist Church of College Hill, but make no mistake, Brown has no intention of retiring. By giving up the responsibilities of running a 1,500-member church, he'll be able to devote his energies full time to his passion.

That's helping the people who didn't make the right choices, maybe didn't have a good example when they needed one. The people now locked away for their crimes.

'Give Back What You Were Given'

He has survived poverty, segregation, cancer. He figures the good Lord is keeping him around for a reason. So he'll keep serving as long as he's able.

"That's what we were taught to do," Brown says in his mellifluous drawl. "Give back what you were given in order to make your community successful."

He came into the world like a lot of blacks back then, delivered by a neighborhood midwife in a small clapboard house on Harrison Alley in Tampa's Belmont Heights. It was so far out of town from where the white people lived that the residents called it Montana.

Abraham Robert Brown was a surprise addition to his family. His sister was 13 years older; his brother, 10. The nation was sliding toward the Great Depression, but the Brown family was already poor. They didn't have running water or electricity. For heat, little Abe collected discarded wooden railroad ties to burn; kerosene lamps provided light.

"I remember how delicate the shades were. They didn't cost but a dime," Brown recalls. "But I'd get a whooping if I broke one because that was a dime that was wasted."

His daddy left when he was 3. Years later, every time he went into correctional facilities for one of his outreach crusades, he half expected a prisoner to come and introduce himself. "Abraham, I'm your daddy." Never happened, though.

His mother, Emma, cleaned to pay the bills, first at the downtown Union Station and then in Palma Ceia, settling in a seat in the back of the city bus to get to her jobs. She expected the same work ethic from her children.

"Never let the sun catch you in bed," she would admonish when they slept past sunrise.

By the time he had outgrown toddlerhood, Brown was looking for ways to make a penny. He would go to the outdoor farmers market to pick up bruised fruits and vegetables that had fallen off the produce truck. What the family didn't eat, he sold.

On Saturdays, his mama gave him a nickel for the streetcar ride to Cass and Franklin streets. He would walk eight miles on Florida Avenue to Sulphur Springs, where he shined shoes for the used-car salesmen who wanted to look extra spiffy on the weekends. On a really good day, he brought home as much as $1.75.

His mama heaped a lot of praise on him.

"She'd hug me and applaud me for my efforts," he says. "It made me feel so good, I couldn't get back out there fast enough."

Neither of Brown's siblings finished high school. Emma, who later married the man who would be Abe's stepdaddy, roofer Sam Varnes, was determined her youngest child would be different. A Baptist with a strong Christian faith, she worked long hours and did without so she could send Abe to St. Benedict's, the Catholic grade school for the poor black kids. Education, she told him repeatedly, was the key to survival. And back then, Brown recalls, "It was a challenge to survive."

Brown attended Booker T. Washington for ninth grade and enrolled at Middleton High in his sophomore year. He had seen just one football game in his life, but he made Middleton's team and played basketball, too. Football won him a scholarship to Florida A&M; without the money, he doubts he could have gone.

In his senior year, a professor told the class to go back to the communities they came from and do some good. You have an education now, the teacher said. Make something of yourself and be a contribution to society.

That's advice Brown, Class of 1950, never forgot.

'He Has That Can-Do Attitude'

Brown has an infatuation with his hometown, though he grew up in an era when people here suffered for the color of their skin.

"You made the best of things, and you hoped for a better day," he says. "That day finally came."

There was never a question that he wouldn't return home. He made $250 a month, big money back then, in his first job as a physical education teacher at Carver Junior High School and coaching football in the afternoons. Still, to afford a car and eat a steak once a month, he worked as a waiter at Tampa Yacht Club on weekends.

His career with the school system included teaching and coaching at Middleton, Blake, Jefferson and Chamberlain high schools, giving Brown the opportunity to influence thousands of students. Carl Norton, a 1959 Middleton graduate, was one of those who heeded Brown's example.

"He's always given more than he was asked. If the country had 200,000 Abe Browns, we'd be in great shape," says Norton, a Tampa consultant. "He has that can-do attitude that you can succeed at anything you put your mind to."

He wasn't out to win any popularity contests. Brown is a no-nonsense guy, whose stern demeanor earned him the nickname "Mean Dean Brown" when he worked in administration at Chamberlain for 15 years. He was a stickler for rules, routinely patrolling the campus parking lot for sloppily parked cars taking up more than one space. With a notebook filled with students' names and their license plate numbers, he could quickly identify the culprits.

Brown still runs into former students who now appreciate that maddening enforcement of seemingly minor rules. He taught them something.

"You got to stay within the lines," Brown says. "You got to respect one another. And that includes not taking up two parking spaces."

Brown scored a career high when he led Blake to the state football championship in 1969. The next year, he was powerless when the district closed down its two black schools, Blake and Middleton, to integrate the students. Although the schools eventually re-opened on new campuses years later, he says the damage was irreparable.

"A sad time in this town," he says. "It ripped us apart and sent everyone scattering in different directions. We lost a big chunk of our foundation and history."

He says the same of the riots that erupted in the Central Avenue district in 1967, after Tampa police shot and killed Martin Chambers, a black 19-year-old. Many of the businesses that went up in flames never reopened or reclaimed their vitality. "We did nothing but hurt ourselves," he laments.

In 1989, when College Hill residents reacted violently after drug suspect Edgar Allen Price died in police custody, then-Mayor Sandy Freedman walked the neighborhood with Brown, whose calming influence helped restore order. She remembers how she didn't have to ask for his support; he called her.

"That's the kind of person he is," she says. "There are few people in this community who have the integrity, the compassion and the outright love of people that Abe does. And it's reflective in everything he's done for us."

The News That Changed His Life

Raised Christian, Brown says he didn't always live by the word. His first marriage, which produced a daughter, ended after 15 years. Breaking the marital commitment made before God remains one of his biggest regrets.

Two more daughters came along after he married his second wife, Altamese, 40 years ago. He had a secure job, a family to support and the structure he craved.

Then came the news about Horace Jolly.

In 1976, he learned that Jolly, one of his former players, had been charged with murder. He had killed a cabdriver and would get a life sentence.

Brown was devastated. He took the news personally, wondering how he could have taught the boy about football but not about living right. That's when he started visiting prisons.

Willie Dixon, a former Hillsborough County teacher busted for drugs and serving his sentence at Union Correctional Institution in Raiford, heard that his former colleague was visiting the prison. He got approval for Brown to come to a Saturday chapel service. Twenty other inmates showed up.

"I remember there were 21 of us, because Abe had $21 in his pocket and gave each one of us a dollar," Dixon says. "He left there broke."

Brown's ministry helped him in prison and when he was released in 1979. He got his teaching credentials restored, became a minister and worked in real estate. Now he makes his own visits to correctional facilities, giving his testimony and faith-based counseling to offenders seeking restoration.

Dixon says he's just one of thousands whose lives have been altered by Abe Brown Ministries, now in its 32nd year of providing outreach to prisoners and assistance to ex-offenders and their families.

"Abe made a way for people like us to succeed on the outside," he says. "He showed us that with God's help, we can get it right and keep it right. What a blessing he's been, what a powerful impact he's made on so many lives."

Those Who Need Him Most

On Christmas Eve, Abe Brown and a couple dozen volunteers will do what they've done for more than 25 years: They'll climb into the ministry's old bus and make the 160-mile roundtrip to Lowell to take part in a series of services at four correctional facilities. The day begins at 10:30 a.m. and ends about 10 p.m.

He relishes his roles as an educator, a coach and a pastor. But it is here, among broken men and women who made wrong choices and need a new direction, where Brown is in his element. He knows that if he had met most of these offenders on the streets, they wouldn't give him the time of day.

Now he has their attention. Now some will listen, and a few will come around. This is the place where Brown can deliver God's word to an audience that needs it the most.

"I can't get back fast enough," he says. "This is where I began and this is where I'm going to end."

Abe Brown's Words Of Wisdom

On race relations: "We've come a long way. I don't think we'll ever be perfect because race relations has to do with your spiritual growth."

On regrets: Just two - his mama never saw him become a preacher, and his divorce from his first wife. "I was young and foolish. I didn't know Christ then."

On growing up poor: The black community was close-knit back then. "When we didn't have anything, we had everything. You could go to sleep at night with shutting nothing but the screen doors. We were there for each other."

On Tampa's progress: He thinks Tampa is one of the finest cities in the nation. "We've gone from riding in the back of the bus, to driving the bus, to owning the bus."

On prison ministry: It's not the most popular outreach, but: "We found if you lock up a dog and let him go a period of time, ... he's worse than what he was. The same thing happens to human beings."

On education: It's the ladder to success. You can't make it without it. "The prisons are full of young black men because they took another route."

On sports: Another important way to open doors that may otherwise be closed. It has always been more than just a game to Brown. "You should know both offense and defense. That's the way it is in life, too."

On raising kids: Both parents need to be on the same page. Teach your children principles; teach them about character. "And not just with words," he says. "But by example."

On God: "I can gracefully say that God can do anything but fail."

On a Bible verse to live by: Philippians 4:11: "... for I have learned to be content whatever the circumstances."

Reporter Michelle Bearden can be reached at mbearden@tampatrib.com or at (813) 259-7613.

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