Aubrey Brown, lifelong advocate for peace and justice, died at 78 on February 14, 2015, in Boston, MA. The cause of death was complications due to congestive heart failure. Aubrey was born on February 9, 1937 in Richmond, VA.

Aubrey traced the roots of the activism and deeply held convictions about social justice that shaped his life to his early years in Richmond. His father, Rev. Aubrey Neblett Brown Jr, was a Presbyterian minister and longtime editor of the Presbyterian Outlook; his mother, Sarah (nee Hill) taught piano and early childhood education.

To say that Aubrey was a complex man would be an almost comical oversimplification. To say he was an educated man, an absurd understatement. He graduated cum laude from Harvard College in 1959 with a major in history and went on to conduct "exploratory" studies in theology and sociology at Union Seminary in Richmond and Howard University in Washington, D.C. He worked toward his Ph.D. in sociology at Columbia University in New York City as a Lehman Scholar and much later returned to history studies at Johns Hopkins University.

His quest for social justice began well before that. Just after his junior year at Richmond's Thomas Jefferson High School, he testified against the peacetime extension of the draft before the Senate Armed Forces Committee. As an interdenominational church delegate to the 1955 NAACP Youth Convention, he was called on to deliver a major resolution condemning the Eisenhower administration for moving too slowly to enforce school integration. At Union, he was one of only three white students to stand with black seminary students picketing and pressuring Richmond's Thalheimer's Department Store and other downtown businesses to serve blacks and whites equally.

These early experiences in the Civil Rights Movement and his interactions with those who would become major leaders of this movement, including Andrew Young and Charles Sherrod, loomed large in his mind and carried great significance for him until his final days.

In 1961, while still at UTS, he was one of the first to be accepted into the Peace Corps, newly formed by the Kennedy administration, and served as a teacher in Nigeria for two years. Upon returning to the U.S. to attend Columbia, he helped establish the Committee of Returned Volunteers (CRV), a movement of Americans who had worked overseas in the Peace Corps and other voluntary service organizations. The CRV took part in protests against the war in Vietnam, including the 1967 Confront the Warmakers demonstration to "levitate" the Pentagon.

At Columbia, he was one of almost 1,000 people arrested in 1968 after a weeklong occupation of campus buildings to protest the war and the school's plans to build a gym on Harlem park land. In 1968, he participated in demonstrations at the Democratic Convention in Chicago, where his small CRV contingent led an antiwar march of several thousand people until it was stopped by troops with fixed bayonets.

 He was also part of a delegation of anti-war youth activists that went to Cuba to meet with representatives of the liberation forces from Vietnam. Aubrey ultimately left his Ph.D. studies to work on behalf of labor causes, taking a wide range of blue-collar jobs to help workers reform unions that purported to protect their members but often didn't.

He worked as a fruit picker in California, a truck driver in Manhattan's garment district, an assembly line worker at a Ford Pinto plant (where he was fired for strategically omitting mention of his Harvard A.B. on his job application), a copper smelter in New Jersey and as a coal miner and shopping mall janitor in West Virginia.

During his later years in New York, New Jersey and West Virginia, his attention broadened beyond activism to include family. He wed Melinda Hope Myrick in 1973 and together they raised two children, Jeanette and Roy.

Leaving West Virginia for Washington in 1984, his political activism took something of a backseat when he was hired by the local chapter of the not-yet-merged AFTRA and SAG unions while also teaching history at local community colleges and prisons. Still, as a staunch supporter of reproductive rights throughout the 80s and 90s, he regularly confronted anti-abortion agitators picketing clinics.

When Melinda, was diagnosed with cancer, he brought the same passion and conviction to helping her fight the disease that took her from him in 2000. Later, he reconnected with a former companera and CRV leader from his New York days, Alice Hageman. He and Alice married in 2005 in Boston, where he spent the last decade of his life continuing his fight for peace and justice, contemplating and challenging what he perceived as persistent wrongs in the world, singing with a wonderful group of likeminded friends, tending to an acclaimed garden, and discovering unimagined talents as a doting grandfather.

Two celebrations of Aubrey’s life were held: in Richmond and in Boston

--Jeanette Brown