When Brown was six, his entrepreneurial Uncle Jake taught him how to drive a flatbed truck, enabling fruit pickers to load boxes of oranges, grapefruit, and tangerines in Apopka’s citrus groves.

Jake also ran a thriving moonshine enterprise in central Florida and under his tutelage, Brown was piloting hotrods filled with white lightning by the time he was 11.

Brown had no realistic prospect of attending college until a white woman who owned a casket-making business in Allentown offered to subsidize his higher education.

Following two years on active duty as a Signal Corps officer, Brown joined IBM’s Systems Development Division in Poughkeepsie, New York.

[citation needed] Brown Capital Management caters to high-net-worth individuals, pension and profit sharing plans, charitable organizations and corporations.

[5] Brown Capital Management celebrated its 30th year in business in 2013, occupies a three-story building at 1201 North Calvert Street in downtown Baltimore and has 37 employees.

[9] Brown and his wife Sylvia have faithfully backed causes that improve inner-city Baltimore paradigms, usually through an association with health care, education, or the arts.

One beneficiary has been the Turning the Corner Achievement Program (TCAP), which focuses on attaining improved educational and social outcomes for inner-city Baltimore youths.

Brown tried to attend helicopter flight school while he was a lieutenant in the U.S. Army, but was rejected after the vision in one eye failed to pass visual acuity standards.