Anderson Hunt Brown
The Son of Freed Slaves
money man and the person who knew how to finance projects”
Anderson Hunt Brown was born on April 23, 1880 to Henry Arnold Brown and Margaret Stewart Brown in a three-bedroom house in the segregated area of Dutch Holler, now part of Dunbar, West Virginia. Against the backdrop of a changing America, (Abraham Lincoln had recently announced the Emancipation Proclamation in 1863, with Brown’s parents only becoming freed slaves in 1865), Brown’s childhood saw early examples and experiences of hard work and entrepreneurship. His parents took up a wide range of jobs to make ends meet, often enlisting him and his siblings’ help, from farm work to laundry.
His father had previously been owned by a man named Enis Arnold, who operated a wholesale dried goods business in Charleston. Upon being freed, Brown’s father went on to work in a saloon and on a farm, while his mother Margaret had aspirations for the children to be educated and to learn to read and write. It was for this reason that Margaret did not allow her husband to relocate the family out to the farm, instead moving to Charleston and into a three-four bedroom place on Court Street, which was, at the time, one of the few places where housing was rented out to people of color, for five dollars a month.
Race Relations
While Growing Up
Despite being born right in the aftermath of slavery being abolished, Anderson Hunt Brown grew up with distinct and lasting memories of tense race relations between White and Black populations in the state. In audio interviews conducted with his daughter Della shortly before his death in 1974, he recounted experiences growing up hearing about the sporadic lynchings of Black people in Kanawha County, and how these individuals were often unrepresented and went through unfair trials, if given a trial at all. He shared that hangings would take place in the town courthouse yard in a ‘circus-like’ atmosphere, and was able to remember a number of occasions where his grandmother would take him to see these public hangings. Brown highlighted one occasion where, as a boy, he witnessed the public hanging of a German man called Felix Camp who had killed his own children, although such sentences of white people were noticeably rare compared to those of Black people.
In reality, West Virginia was spared the worst of the lynching era which cost thousands of African-American lives throughout the late 19th and 20th centuries. Even though President Woodrow Wilson eventually spoke out against lynchings, and West Virginia was early to enact anti-legislation in 1921, Congress itself never enacted anti-lynching legislation. To put things into perspective, it would be a century later in March 2022 when President Joe Biden signed the Emmett Till Anti-Lynching Act, finally making lynching a federal hate crime.
Climate of Segregation and Involvement with Legislation
Such segregation between black and white communities prevailed well into Brown’s adulthood, and indeed made a profound impact on his life, the ways in which he conducted his businesses, and even catapulted his eventual involvement with the law and legislation. Segregation thrived in all public places: schools, hospitals, restaurants and hotels, places of entertainment and other facilities. By this time, Brown had fathered two children, Willard Brown and Della Brown Taylor Hardman, who would later on become a professor at West Virginia State University.
It was when Della was around six years old and forbidden to enter the Charleston Library that Anderson Hunt Brown knew he had to take further action in the fight against segregation. The city of Charleston had previously maintained a separate library for African-American citizens, but Brown saw an opportunity to fight back after another Black legislator, T.G. Nutter, a Kanawha County Republican who was also an NAACP lawyer, represented an African-American couple in a successful lawsuit against restrictive real estate covenants in the late 1920s.
This landmark case of White v. White saw the West Virginia Supreme Court outlawing racial and religious discrimination in the sale of property.
In 1928, Nutter represented Anderson Hunt Brown, E.L. Powell and W.W. Sanders in a lawsuit that finally resulted in the high court desegregating the main Charleston library. The court said that taxpayers’ money could not be used for a main library while excluding Black taxpayers.
This landmark win was the beginning of A.H. Brown’s long road in using his influence and wealth to successfully launch and win court battles, striking down segregation laws in public spheres all around his home state. He also instilled the same passion for civil rights in his children, as his son Willard L. Brown would later become the first Black judge in West Virginia representing the state chapter of the NAACP in cases of racial discrimination. He was the lead lawyer for the West Virginia NAACP in the historic U.S. Supreme Court school desegregation ruling of 1954, generally known as Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka, an important and far-reaching case that impacted West Virginia, the District of Columbia and 16 other states. Remarkably, the opposition (1924 Democratic presidential candidate John W. Davis) argued on behalf of South Carolina for the continuation of segregation, though Governor Marland accepted the ensuing high court decision as the law of the land, effectively banning segregation in public schools. Despite these incredible victories, the fight for desegregation of other public places was a different fight altogether.
A.H. Brown (third from left) stands with a group that includes Martin Luther King, Sr. at Charleston, West Virginia’s First Baptist Church in 1971. WEST VIRGINIA STATE ARCHIVES
In the 1950s, African-Americans were still not allowed to dine at many restaurants and eateries, launching many sit-ins and protest demonstrations by the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) and other ad hod student groups. A.H. Brown would go on to file a lawsuit against Sky Chief Restaurant at Kanawha (now Yeager) Airport, via his son Willard Brown, but even so, Charleston’s downtown lunch counters would not seat Blacks until 1958, with the West Virginia Human Rights Commission reporting in 1962 that “many places continue to refuse service and some follow different policies at different times.”
The lack of equal opportunities and resources for Black people was a major impetus for many of Brown’s eventual successes. After having gone through the horrific losses of three wives to childbirth, he began to fight for increased medical care for Black citizens. This fight eventually led to the launch of the Community Hospital in 1924, the city of Charleston’s first state-of-the-art hospital for Black residents.
But it was his continued frustration with lack of affordable housing for Black families that would truly catapult Anderson Hunt Brown to building a real estate empire in order to serve his community and create opportunities for Black citizens to thrive.
"He actually walked the talk. He lived by the credo that he was in a position to help others and in so doing, he was enriched, but also the community benefited as a whole."
Early steps in
Real Estate and Adversities
In the 1910s, the death of a brother entitled him to acquire from his estate the resources to begin business for himself. He was able to buy the meat market where he had learned to cut meat, and at one point had the meat market on one side and a restaurant on the other. After going out of business, Brown moved to Court Street and rented a room for a while, while simultaneously starting the process of buying a house on 1009 Young Street.
He went swiftly on to put up a building for $3200 through a Jackson County Loan, as ‘loans to African-Americans at the time were not happening in Charleston’. Brown was only able to obtain the loan through a friend. The terms of the loan were supposed to be set at $100 a month on $10 interest. However, his deed writer, a German man, made the mistake of writing up the terms as $50 a month; a turn of events that A. H. Brown credits to, ‘the Lord being with me - because I didn’t have $100 a month that time anyhow!’ and had been wondering how he was going to convince the German man to write it off as $50 in the first place.
He rented the whole house out to a man for $50 a month but the renter would soon be unable to keep up with payment. A.H. Brown struggled as he himself was only earning about $20 a month at the time. After the Depression era lifted, he started earning more money by switching jobs in Boston.
He left the market where he was only getting $15-20 a week, and started working at a motor car company building where he was put in charge. Soon, however, he had to leave Boston and return to Charleston to take care of his ailing mother and take ownership once again of a meat market in the city.
Despite these setbacks, Brown’s early wading in the real estate pool was significant as the 1920s was a difficult era, not only in terms of financial burdens but also in terms of racial divide. The all-white National Association of Real Estate Boards started petitioning the courts to have the term ‘realtor’ be an exclusive trademark so Black real estate professionals were not legally allowed to refer to themselves as ‘realtors’. Black real estate entrepreneurs like Brown had little to no access to bank loans, but were allowed to capitalize on niche markets, i.e. selling only to their own communities.
Until The Fair Housing Act of 1968 was passed, racist policies and practices in housing were essentially legal, making it extremely challenging for Black individuals to build wealth in real estate. Don Peebles, CEO of The Peebles Corporation, said, “In order for Black people and Black entrepreneurs to be successful, they had to be outliers”, and even today, only about 2% of real estate firms in the US are minority-owned.
Gaining Momentum and Applying Street Smarts
Brown often credited an attorney by the name of C.E. Kimbreau for being a big part of the workings of his office for many years, calling him ‘one of the most able land title abstractors of any lawyer in the city’. Mr Kimbreau advised Brown on many occasions when it came to purchasing property, and they ventured into many real estate deals together, including a tract of land adjoining the West Virginia state college. They refurbished the area, sold quite a few lots together, and then sold the balance of their holdings that would later be developed into a private local airport, (later in turn taken over by a chemical plant).
However, not all of Brown’s partnerships were as transparent and fully collaborative.
One of his earlier lessons in real estate partnership involved the opportunity to take hold of 9 acres of land. The plan was for him to partner alongside a man by the name of Mr. Bloomberg, who would provide the money to buy the land upon speaking with the owners, (who lived in different parts of the city), and they would split the profit once they resold the land. Despite their mutual verbal understanding, Brown had the foresight to first settle with a written agreement with his business partner before putting him in touch with the owners. After a period of significant stalling, ‘an armistice was signed’ that involved all 9 acres. Brown ended up securing 50% of the $4000 profit, (just over $71,000 today).
Real Estate that
Empowered Others
Brown was described by peers as a consummate entrepreneur, “the money man and the person who knew how to finance projects, with an amazing work ethic.”
Even though there were many other developers at the time whose aim seemed to be helping under-served communities, it was done in a way that still exploited Black customers who had few options or rights to live anywhere else. It was against these odds that Anderson Hunt Brown used his wealth and strategic thinking to help create high-quality housing, similar to models attributed to fellow Black real estate businessmen Philip A. Payton Jr. in Harlem and Dempsey Travis in Chicago.
In the early 1920s, Brown partnered up with Gurnett E. Ferguson who built the Ferguson Hotel (an African-American establishment) during the mid to late 1920s. The Ferguson Hotel went on to attract some of the century’s greatest icons in music: from Ella Fitzgerald to Count Basie, Louis Armstrong to Nat King Cole.
While Ferguson was to build the hotel and restaurant, Brown would build business rooms, a Greek-operated hot dog stand, drug store, barber shop, cleaning and pressing facilities, shoe repairing shop, taxi stand, and a printing shop.
Brown’s project also included building and renting office space to local entrepreneurs, including the historic Brown Building. The thriving area around the properties became known as “The Block”, a safe gathering space for the Black community for more than half a century, and would later become West Virginia’s first recognized local historic district.
The original Brown building adjoined the Ferguson Hotel, making the area a major social and economic center. The Block was a 25-acre tract of land bounded by Washington, Shrewsbury, Lewis and Leon Sullivan streets, and served not only the African-American community of the city during the harrowing Jim Crow laws and segregation, but other ethnic groups as well.
Brown’s pivotal role in creating such important, safe spaces for under-represented communities is evident in James D. Randall and Anna Evans Gilmer’s book, Black Past: “...the events of the day were relived here [The Brown Building] nightly. Likewise, the older men would gather in Mr. Brown’s Real Estate Office to do the same. Mr. Brown could be found from early morning through late evening in his office, which was shared with his son, Attorney Willard Brown.”
Family friends would recall how Anderson Hunt Brown would not only provide these professional and housing spaces for Black citizens, but go above and beyond in outfitting many of the offices with the supplies business owners would need, such as equipping an aspiring printer business in one of the office spaces with the printing machines they needed.
He was quick to expand his real estate enterprise based on the gaps he saw in society: renting out affordably to Black communities who had trouble securing homes from otherwise all-white realtors. In another example, when his children attended Boston University, Brown bought three properties in Massachusetts as housing was not provided to Black students; he let his children live in one house, and rented out the others to their fellow Black classmates.
Lessons, Legacy and
Lasting Impact on
Real Estate
Anderson Hunt Brown was no pushover, standing his ground when he knew he had the right to. In the 1960s, when a fire partially destroyed the Ferguson Hotel adjoining the original Brown building, Ferguson, who had racked up a significant debt to the bank, sold his property to another hotel business. When the bank approached Brown, he replied, “You got Ferguson for practically nothing - if you get mine, you’re gonna pay my price.” He rejected their initial offer of $80,000, then again at their upping to $190,000. He eventually sold the original Brown Building at a settlement of $200,000 in cash. A second Brown Building was built and completed in 1971, right next to the First Baptist Church, and it was a project he made sure was completely done by local African-American businesses: from contractors, masonry, carpentry, to electric and heating.
By the time of his death in 1974 at the age of 94, Brown had owned and managed up to 100 properties.
His legacy carries on today even with the dreams he never realized before his death, such as opening a bank to serve the Black community. On that front, his legacy carries on in his great-grandson, Wole Coaxum, a fintech and social entrepreneur, who founded MoCaFi (short for “Mobility Capital Finance”) as a mobile-first banking initiative aimed to address the racial financial inclusion and wealth gaps in America.
Anderson Hunt Brown used his influence and the entrepreneurial spirit he was born with not merely to create wealth for himself, but to bridge the many societal gaps he saw around him, such as integrating communities in public spheres, from local swimming pools to libraries to lunch counters. His contributions to civil rights had lasting ramifications for Black communities and other ethnic groups, and his pioneering role in the property sector liberated and elevated the African-American real estate experience.
