Mildred Dee Brown

Born 1905-12-20 AL (USA)

Died 1989-11-02
Omaha, NE (USA)

Buried
Omaha, NE (USA)
Forest Lawn Memorial Park

Brown co-founded the Omaha Star, with her husband in 1938 and took a managing role after the couple separated in 1943. After 1945 she ran the paper as owner and publisher until her death in 1989. In 1965 U.S. President Lyndon Johnson, who had commended Brown for her coverage of civil rights, noted her as at that time "the only black woman who was the owner-founder of a black newspaper still in existence." (Johnson quoted in Wirth, noted below)

In 2007 Brown was posthumously inducted into the Nebraska Journalism Hall of Fame. The Omaha Star Building has been listed on the National Register of Historic Places because of the paper's importance in the history of Omaha, journalism, and the civil rights movement.

Brown is profiled in Eileen Wirth, From Society Page to Front Page: Nebraska Women in Journalism. 2013.

Places Lived

Alabama
Omaha, NE

Author Of

Journalism

Keywords

African-American Stories; Omaha Star Newspaper; Omaha (Nebraska)--History

Occupation

Teacher
Journalist
Co-Founder, Owner, Publisher and Editor, The Omaha Star

Places Worked

The Omaha Star

Honors

United States Goodwill Ambassador (appointed by President Lyndon Johnson, 1960s)
Omaha Business Hall of Fame
Nebraska Journalism Hall of Fame, inducted 2007
Mildred Brown Memorial Strolling Park, near the Omaha Star building (dedicated 2008)
NAACP "Unsung Heroine" service award, 1981
Mildred Brown Scholarship for minority students at Creighton University
The Omaha World Herald (9-2-2018) has reported on a campaign to get the U.S. Postal Service to issue a commemorative stamp honoring Brown.

Associations

Shirl Edward Gilbert, former husband, divorced 1943
Charles B.Washington
Bertha Calloway

Bibliography

See:
Amy Helene Forss, Black Print with a White Carnation: Mildred Brown and the Omaha Star Newspaper: 1938-1989. 2013.
Eileen Wirth, From Society Page to Front Page: Nebraska Women in Journalism. 2013.

We appreciate corrections and additions to our information about authors, but please read the following guidelines and caveats carefully.

The Nebraska Authors database is based on publicly available sources. Unless you are the author contacting us in person, it helps us if you cite the source or sources of your information. We cannot include unsourced information in the database.
We may be appreciative of information we choose not to include in the publicly available database.
To include an image on an author profile, please send jpg attachment to nebraskaauthors@lincoln.ne.gov. A photo-release agreement is required before the image will be published on this site.
Because of the way we are staffed, expect corrections or additions to take time, sometimes up to three months.
While we initially included some actual links to external URLs in the database, we will in the future no longer provide functioning links. We will instead record the presence of specific external materials in language that we hope will help intelligent users find it themselves. Web rot, in which actual materials remain online but undergo changes in their URLs, is too demanding in terms of staff time for us to hope to keep external links current.

Please copy, fill out the form below, and email it to heritage@lincoln.ne.gov to suggest a change.