[4][5] Brown was one of only eight students who took the only college class ever taught by Martin Luther King Jr.[4][6] He serves on the board of the California Reparations Task Force.

He first met Martin Luther King at the 1956 NAACP national convention in San Francisco, which he attended at the invitation of Medgar Evers, who drove Brown there personally.

[1][7] Medgar Evers, then field secretary of the NAACP, intervened,[7] threatening a lawsuit to force desegregation of a nearby white high school.

[13] While a member of the Board of Supervisors, he proposed an ordinance that would prohibit standing on a street corner for more than five minutes, with loiterers facing a $250 fine and up to six months imprisonment.

According to Brown, the first organized "sit-down movement", as it was then referred to, was in Oklahoma City in August 1958, led by the NAACP Youth Council.

[24] Brown has called for reparations to be paid to black people, to aid in economic empowerment and compensate for deficiencies in education.

[1] Under his leadership, the Third Baptist Church has sponsored many African refugees, and enabled 80 children from Tanzania to receive heart surgery in the United States.

[8] In late December 2023, rapper and small business owner Xiao Chuan, also known as Chino Yang, accused Brown of intimidation.

After Chuan released a music video that criticized Mayor London Breed for San Francisco's high crime rates, Brown allegedly confronted him at his business.

According to Chuan, Brown demanded that the rapper repudiate the song and apologize, threatening to organize the city's black community against him if he did not.