Percy Brown stands outside the church where he grew up, Mt. Zion Baptist Church in Madison. (Photo by Erik Gunn/Wisconsin Examiner)

For more than two decades, Percy Brown has worked as an educator, his core priority striving to address gaps in achievement between Black and white students.

There’s no single cause for those gaps, Brown says. Poor teaching methods are one factor, in his view. He points to changes in how reading is taught, for example, that have been shown to improve reading proficiency among white and Black students alike.

But, he contends, that’s only part of the answer. A legacy of discrimination through the generations demands more careful attention to making sure every student is fully welcome at the schoolhouse door and gets the opportunity to learn and thrive, he says, in the classroom and out.

Brown pursued that goal as the director of equity and student achievement in the Middleton School District, west of Madison, and more recently as a trainer and consultant on diversity and equity in education as well as a speaker on other education-related topics.

Biases about Black students’ inherent academic abilities persist, Brown contends — influencing not only white teachers but Black students as well.

“We’ve dealt with racial inferiority being placed on us and embedded in the psyche of all of America for a very, very long time,” Brown says. “And while we might have egalitarian beliefs, those stereotypes and biases are still there.”

Concern about that legacy drove Brown to write “Strength Through Generations” — a combination memoir, thumbnail sketch of Black history and call to action.

The book has more than one audience, Brown says. 

One audience is fellow educators — “to reach teachers, to help them be more culturally responsive in the classroom,” Brown says.

“I also wrote it for high school students that are African-American, so that they can learn more about their history, with the hope that that inspires them,” he says. “To know thyself is so key to what you’ll be able to do in life.”

DEI under attack

The book comes at a time when organized programs to address racial diversity, promote equity to overcome centuries of discrimination and subjugation, and promote inclusion of the broad range of people into national life and institutions are under fierce attack.

Starting on his first day in office President Donald Trump has issued a series of executive orders aimed at ending diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) programs in federal government and education while also condemning inclusive policies in the private sector.

Brown has critiqued some of the ways DEI has been carried out. When he read an audit of Universities of Wisconsin DEI programs conducted by the Legislative Audit Bureau on behalf of the Legislature, he was struck that there seemed to be no consistent definition throughout the system for DEI.

But he also considers the anti-DEI wave a backlash to the protests in 2020 after the police killing of George Floyd. “That woke up the world,” Brown says. “There was a coming together, and it wasn’t even politicized like that.”

Right-wing influencers began attacking critical race theory — a complex, academic concept — and subsequently DEI, he observes, deploying “the anti-woke rhetoric to really scare people.”

Six years earlier, however, in Middleton, “I was able to collaborate and get support from people on the right side of the aisle to try to make things better for historically disenfranchised students,” Brown says. “It wasn’t a boogie man.”

The book’s publication is especially timely, he believes.

“There’s a lot going on that I would say is just anti-‘We the people’ — unless you’re talking about ‘We the People’ in its original intent for this nation to be a nation for white people — and then nobody else,” Brown says.

Family history and Black history

Brown’s book weaves the stories of his grandfather’s involvement in the civil rights struggles in rural, segregated Mississippi and the lives of his father, aunts and uncles growing up there together with a primer on Black history.

“As a Black male educator with a background in social studies, I know that America’s schools focus heavily on teaching slavery, but this does not address the more significant curricular issue when it comes to the history of Black people,” Brown writes in the book’s introduction. “There’s no mention of ancient African civilizations, such as the Kingdoms of Mali, Songhai, Benin, Kemet, Nubia, Axum and Ethiopia.”

By teaching “a more comprehensive history of Black people,” he writes, educators can appropriately build self-esteem of Black children and also “change the perception of those who are not Black.”

Brown’s father, Percy Sr., and his father’s siblings integrated their local high school in Mississippi in 1965 after the district was forced to admit Black students. Ku Klux Klan members burned a cross at their home and fired gunshots. “The intimidation was real, as real as could be,” Percy Sr. told his son in an interview included in the book.

Finding common ground

His father moved north from Mississippi to attend the University of Wisconsin-Madison, graduating in 1975. Percy Brown Jr. grew up in Madison, and his book reflects on the racial divisions then and now in the state’s capital city despite its progressive image.

When it came time to go to college, Brown attended Delta State University in Mississippi near where his father grew up.

A bout of spring cleaning helped trigger Brown’s idea to write the book. He turned up a paper he had written as an undergraduate in 1997 “about the need to incorporate Black history into the curriculum to help build the self-esteem of Black children,” he recalls. The paper concluded with his declaration that one day he would write a book about Black history to help meet that need.

Not long after finding the paper, he traveled to Egypt in 2023 to learn about the African roots of one of the world’s oldest civilizations — roots that Brown says have long been unappreciated.

“Going to Egypt — that was transformational for me, and in a lot of ways I think I felt more closely connected to the human family,” Brown says.

The final push for the book came from the CEO at a publishing firm that specializes in producing books by entrepreneurs.

While his book focuses on Black experience, Brown says that in his consulting work he sees parallel experiences in places where the population is all white or nearly so.

Conducting a student assembly (about being safe online) in Door County, he got a firsthand look at the way schools there are also under-resourced. “My empathy for them up there is no different than the empathy that I have for the Black kids here in the community,” Brown says.

He worries about polarization and what he calls the tribalism that divides the public.

“The things that we have in common, that’s how you start to build those authentic relationships,” Brown says. “That’s how you start to build community, right? And it’s about our collective shared stories — not shutting down one story.”