Morgan Legacies

(left to right) Samuel, Troy and Avonnee Brown

Becoming the Browns

Troy Brown recalls growing up in Baltimore County, Maryland, in a “Heathcliff and Claire Huxtable-like” environment, where Mom and Dad were accomplished professionals who loved each other and their children; big brother was intelligent and athletic; education, advocacy and self-confidence were highly valued; and an HBCU was near the center of the family’s life.

A Harvard-trained lawyer with a long track record of success in large and small law firms, government and academia, Brown is part of Morgan State University’s powerful history within his family. His late mother, Avonnee Burge Brown, was a stellar history major at Morgan, Class of 1967, who leveraged her prodigious talent and the knowledge and skills she acquired in college to make a positive difference in her community through social service. His father, Samuel Brown, earned his Bachelor of Science in mathematics at Morgan, also in 1967, before his 38-year, Hall of Fame career as a teacher and administrator at Baltimore Polytechnic Institute. Troy followed in his parents’ footsteps, earning a Bachelor of Science in political science and government at Morgan, in 1999.

His parents’ experience at Morgan was clearly a major influence on him, Troy says: “I grew up hearing stories about their time at Morgan, how they met at Morgan, the impact of their…fraternity and sorority on their development, the pride of being young, Black and in college, the pride of being educated and why that was important for my brother and me and how it would be important, too, in terms of dealing with other people, matriculating through education…. My aunt as well as my parents’ friends were people that they went to college with.”

The civil rights movement was the context of many of his parents’ stories about Morgan, Brown adds. “I heard about them doing sit-ins. My father marched. Both my parents did. This was still very much during segregation for them, or right on the edge of it.”

Social Growth

Sam Brown, retired for nearly 17 years now, is happy to talk about his time at Morgan. The first-generation college student arrived on campus from his hometown in rural Frederick County, Maryland, in September 1962, with an outstanding high school record.

“My cousin and best friend was a year ahead of me. In fact, he was pledging Alpha (Phi Alpha Fraternity) when I got there. So I knew I was going to pledge Alpha,” Sam remembers. “I

also knew that so many people flunked out in their first year. So my whole first year, I didn’t go to any parties…. I went to the library after dinner, partly because I was kind of ‘country’ and didn’t really know how to relate to many people, secondly because I wanted to make sure I was OK academically. And I made Promethean Kappa Tau, the freshman honor society, and pledged Alpha in March of my freshman year. But I was still socially somewhat behind the kids who grew up in the various cities.”

His fraternity, and Morgan, provided him with invaluable opportunities to grow socially, Sam says. “And I took advantage of that opportunity as much as if not more than the opportunities (Morgan) gave me academically. And there were a lot of people like me there, meaning kids who were not overly wealthy, didn’t come from rich families but had middle class values and valued family.”

Having experienced the pain of Jim Crow discrimination in racially segregated Frederick County, Sam responded immediately to the call for Morgan students to join the protests for civil rights near the campus at Northwood Theatre, and elsewhere.

“…When we heard that we were going

to try to integrate Northwood Theatre (in February 1963), my cousin and I walked over to Northwood right away and joined in the march,” Sam recalls. “We were what they called trespassing, marching around the theater.”

The two were arrested — along with hundreds of other protestors — and spent three uncomfortable days and nights in jail before they were released, their charges were dropped, and the theater was integrated.

“I have never ever had that arrest expunged from the record,” Sam says, “because…it’s one of the things I’m most proud of.”

Turning Points

On Morgan’s campus in 1964, Sam met the love of his life: Avonnee Burge, an honors student from a prominent, college-educated, community-oriented family in Cherry Hill, in Baltimore City. Sam’s grades slipped as he focused his attention on his beloved and on the social growth he says benefited him later in his career. Moreover, he was in no hurry to be separated from Avonnee by graduating before her. But when she threatened during her senior

year not to marry Sam if he didn’t graduate, he applied himself fully to the task.

“So my final year at Morgan, I worked my butt off. I think I had the highest grades I’d had since my freshman year,” Sam recalls.

After their graduation in spring 1967, Avonnee was the first of the two new graduates to land a job with career potential, with the Baltimore City Department of Social Services, that summer. Sam was working as an attendant at Rosewood State Hospital, and worrying about the prospect of being drafted by the military to fight in Vietnam, when he landed an interview that fall with the supervisor of math teachers for Baltimore City Public Schools. Sam impressed his interviewer during a brief conversation, using some of the math and social skills he’d developed at Morgan, and was immediately offered a job as a math teacher at Baltimore Polytechnic Institute (“Poly”), a highly rated public high school that was beginning its first year in a newly constructed building. Sam

began teaching at Poly in September, and he and Avonnee married two months later, in November. Sam and his interviewer, William Gerardi, later worked together for 11 years, when Gerardi served as Poly’s principal.

Sam was one of the few African-American faculty for the predominantly white, all-male student body at Poly when he arrived, he recalls. With no student teaching experience, he struggled with balancing encouragement of students with the need to manage the classroom, he admits.

“But by the second semester of my second year, it just clicked…” he says. “Just letting kids know you cared about them: I found that when you did that, if in fact any of them caused a problem, they would listen to you, because they there were typically a number of students from HBCUs. We all felt the pressure, but I think we all had that internal, self-perpetuating confidence, that kind of fire to compete and to feel confident with all of our peers, no matter what their financial or economic background was or what their educational background was,” says Troy, who now heads his own law firm, Brown Law Office, LLC, in Baltimore City. The boutique firm represents clients in commercial transactions and litigation, dispute resolution, estate planning and other matters. “Morgan made me incredibly comfortable and confident being the man I am, the man I wanted to be, being comfortable in my own skin, speaking in class, using my voice,” Troy continues. “That was the most important thing.”

The loss of Avonnee to a sudden illness in 2009 is still painful to the Brown family, but Sam finds strong comfort in his Morgan memories,

Samuel Brown and Son Troy Avonnee and Samuel Brown

To nominate a Morgan Legacies family to be featured in a future issue, please send name and contact info to alumni@morgan.edu.

already knew you cared…. When they think it’s just out of anger or you’re being tentative, it was no good. So I adapted my (teaching) style to my personality.”

Fond Memories

That learning experience as a teacher helped him in raising his children. Todd, Sam and Avonnee’s eldest, was born in 1968. Troy was born in 1977, 10 years into his father’s career at Poly and 14 years before he went to Poly himself, as a freshman. Four years later, as his father was growing into his new job as head of Poly’s math department and his mother was working as Director of Volunteer Services for Good Shepherd School, Troy graduated from Poly and enrolled in Morgan as a freshman, on a full academic scholarship.

At MSU, “I got to craft myself into the intellectual I wanted to be in preparation for law school,” Troy says. “Morgan…gave me an encyclopedic understanding of many different things. It helped me with my writing.”

“When I look at the people of color, the Black people who were in law school with me, such as attending Homecoming and the Howard Cornish alumni chapter’s Martin Luther King Jr. scholarship breakfast with his wife, each year, and helping her with projects she led for the sorority she had joined during her student days at Morgan: Alpha Kappa Alpha Sorority, Inc. The couple became lifetime members of the MSU Alumni Association.

“Morgan was so very, very important to me,” says Sam, who retired from Poly as an assistant principal in 2005. “Academically, my wife and my son Troy were so much better students. We used to laugh at the dinner table at times. They’d say, ‘Well, you know, as far as grades are concerned, you’re really at the bottom of the family.’ And my wife would say, ‘because you wouldn’t study like you were supposed to.’ I’d laugh all the time. I’d say, ‘Yeah, but I was learning how to relate to people.’ Morgan was fantastic to me.” n