William Cornelius Brown

William “Willie” Cornelius Brown was born in 1877 in Cowan County, North Carolina on a farm to Whitmel and Fanny Brown. According to the 1900 census, he continued to live with his parents on the farm while also teaching locally before becoming a preacher at the AME Church in Cowan County.¹ He attended the State Normal School in Elizabeth City, North Carolina and Westbrook Seminary in Portland, Maine, from 1900 to 1904. He ministered in Massachusetts, Virginia, North Carolina, and Connecticut. In 1901, he married Gertrude Capehart.² During the 1911-1912 academic school year, he took graduate-level courses at the Yale Divinity School as a special (non-degree) student.³

In the 1930s, during Hitler’s rise in Europe, Brown, together with the Reverend Adam Clayton Powell, Sr. (YSD special student 1895-1896) sought dialogue with the Jewish community and preached against antisemitism to their parishioners in Brooklyn and Harlem. He also joined together with Powell, as well as other Black clergy members in New York, to form the Committee for Ethiopia to condemn the Italian invasion of Ethiopia and lobby the United States for arbitration.⁴

In 1920, Brown was sent to minister the First Church in Brooklyn, and became active in the community, serving as a leader in the Brooklyn Urban League, the Ministerial Alliance, the Order of the Elks, Pythias Grand Lodge, Zion Ministers Council, and the Kings County Republican Committee. He was known as well as a great administrator, increasing membership in the church as well as getting the church out of debt, and he was expected to become a bishop as early as 1927.⁵ He was elected to become a bishop in 1936 and rotated bishoprics, serving Texas, the Pacific Coast, Missouri and Kentucky. He returned to Brooklyn before retiring in 1960.⁶ He died in 1964 at the age of 87 and was buried in Edenton, N.C.⁷