Jim Brown, football and civil rights champion, dies at age 87

Jim Brown, Cleveland Browns fullback who was hailed as one of the greatest players in professional football history and who remained in the public eye as a Hollywood action star and civil rights activist, though his name was later tarnished by allegations of violent conduct against women , died Thursday night at his home in Los Angeles. He turned 87.

His family announced his death on Instagram on Friday.

Brown played for the Browns from 1957 to 1965 after earning all-American honors from Syracuse University in football and lacrosse, and helped propel Cleveland to the 1964 National Football League Championship.

In every game he dragged defenders if he didn’t run over them or flatten them with a straight arm. He dodged them with his footwork when he wasn’t swiping to outsmart them. He never missed a game and pierced the defensive lines in 118 straight regular-season games, though he played one year with a broken toe and another with a sprained wrist.

“All you can do is grab, hold, hold, and wait for help,” Sam Huff, the Hall of Fame middle linebacker for the Giants and Washington Redskins (now the Commanders), once told Time magazine.

Brown was named the greatest football player of the 20th century in 1999 by a six-person panel of experts compiled by The Associated Press. A panel of 85 experts selected by NFL Films in 2010 ranked him No. 2 all-time behind the San Francisco 49ers’ wide receiver Jerry Rice.

He was inducted into the Pro Football Hall of Fame in 1971, the Lacrosse Hall of Fame in 1984, and the College Football Hall of Fame in 1995.

Still in top form and just 30 years old, Brown stunned the football world in the summer of 1966 by retiring to pursue an acting career.

He had appeared in the 1964 western “Rio Conchos” and was involved in the filming of the World War II movie “The Dirty Dozen” in England, planning to attend the Browns’ training camp afterwards. But wet weather delayed the completion of filming. When he notified Art Modell, the owner of the Browns, that he would be late in reporting, Modell said he would fine him for every day he missed camp. Offended by the threat, Brown called a press conference to announce he was done with professional football.

As the modern civil rights movement gained momentum in the 1950s, few elite athletes spoke out on racial issues. But Brown did not hesitate.

While playing for the Browns to promote economic development in Cleveland’s black neighborhoods, he founded the Negro Industrial and Economic Union (later known as the Black Economic Union) as a means of creating jobs. It facilitated loans to black businessmen in poor areas — what he called Green Power — reflecting his long-held belief that economic self-sufficiency held more promise than mass protests.

In June 1967, Brown invited other leading black athletes, notably Bill Russell and Lew Alcindor (the future Kareem Abdul-Jabbar) to his Economic Union office to hear Muhammad Ali’s account of his religious and moral beliefs at a time when Ali had done that. was stripped of his heavyweight boxing title and faced jail time for refusing to be drafted in protest of the Vietnam War.

In what came to be called the Ali Summit, seen as a watershed moment for the development of racial awareness among athletes, Brown and the others publicly expressed their support for Ali during the session.

By the early 1970s, Brown’s Economic Union had largely faded away. But in the late 1980s, he founded the Amer-I-Can Foundation to teach basic life skills to gang members and inmates, mostly in California, and keep them away from continued senseless violence. It expanded nationwide and remains active.

Handsome with a magnificent physique – he was a chiseled 6 feet 2 inches and 230 pounds – Brown appeared in many movies and was sometimes credited as a Black Superman for his cinematic adventures.

“While the range of emotions Brown displayed on screen was no larger than a letterbox, he never embarrassed himself, never played a demeaning stereotype of the comedic patsy,” wrote James Wolcott in The New York Review of Books in his review of Dave Zirin’s 2018 biography “Jim Brown: Last Man Standing.” He called Brown “a robust chassis for a more confident figure, the black uberman.”

One of Brown’s best-remembered roles came in “The Dirty Dozen” (1967), in which he was one of 12 convicts assembled by the military for a near-suicide mission to assassinate high-ranking German officers who were in a French chateau housed to help blunt the Nazi response to the anticipated D-Day invasion of Normandy. He then played a naval captain in the Cold War thriller “Ice Station Zebra” (1968).

In 1969, he was portrayed as having sex with Raquel Welch in the western “100 Rifles”, the first major Hollywood motion picture to depict a black man making love to a white woman.

Brown was “becoming a black John Wayne; or maybe John Wayne with a touch of Malcolm X in it,” Gloria Steinem wrote in New York magazine in 1968. “I don’t want to play Negro roles,” Brown told Mrs. Steinem. “Just cool, tough modern men who are also Negroes. And not good guys all the time.

But Brown had a problematic personal life.

He was arrested more than six times, most of them when women accused him of violent behavior, during the years when prominent men, such as athletes, actors and political figures were generally not held accountable by the public for alleged offenses against women .

But Brown has never been convicted of a major crime. In some cases, prosecutors refused to testify, and in others he was acquitted by juries.

The first accusation against Brown was made in 1965 when an 18-year-old woman testified that he assaulted her at a Cleveland motel. Brown denied the charge and was found not guilty in a jury trial. A year later, the woman filed a civil paternity suit claiming that Brown had fathered her baby girl. The jury ruled in his favour.

In June 1968, police arrived at Brown’s Hollywood home after a neighbor called to report a disturbance, and found his 22-year-old girlfriend, Eva Bohn-Chin, a model, bloodied and badly injured on his patio. They suspected that Brown had thrown her off his second-floor balcony. He said she fell. Ms. Bohn-Chin refused to testify, resulting in the dismissal of an assault charge. Brown paid a $300 fine for interfering with a police officer who had sought entry to his home. Brown’s wife, Sue Brown, with whom he had three children, divorced in 1972.

When Spike Lee released his 2002 documentary “Jim Brown: All American,” Brown was in a Los Angeles-area jail, having lost an appeal in 1999 over a vandalism conviction. that he smashed the windows of her car with a shovel after an argument.

Brown had been given community service and anger management counseling but refused to accept it and was jailed for nearly four months. But the marriage endured.

“I can definitely get angry, and I’ve taken that anger out inappropriately in the past,” Brown told Sports Illustrated in a prison interview. “But I’ve done that with both men and women.”

(Brown was sentenced to one day in jail and a $500 fine in 1978 for beating and strangling a male friend during their golf game in Inglewood, California, apparently after an argument over where his friend had his ball on the ninth green. placed. )

“So do I have a problem with women?” Brown added in the interview. “No. I’ve had anger and will probably continue to have anger. I just never have to call anyone names again.”

Brown maintained over the years that he had been victimized because of his race or his celebrity status. In an April 1969 interview with Judy Klemesrud of The New York Times, speaking of the balcony incident, he said: “The police were after me because I am free and black and I am supposed to be arrogant and supposed to be militant. are and I swing free and loose and am outspoken on racial issues and I do not preach against black militant groups and I am not humble.

A full obituary will be published shortly.