[3] Growing up on a farm in Kansas, Brown was a star athlete in basketball, football and track before graduating from Lawrence Liberty Memorial High School in 1944.

He was the first African American editor to work for a major daily newspaper in the Rocky Mountain region.

Then, in 1974, in the middle of his fifth Senate term, he was elected Lieutenant Governor of Colorado, a position he held for four years.

In 1978, when Governor Richard Lamm was in Florida on holiday and Brown was acting as governor, he pardoned recently paroled former death row inmate Sylvester Lee Garrison, because Brown felt Garrison never received a fair trial, with an all-white jury and judge.

Later in 1978, Lamm accused Brown of overspending his departmental budget by $10,000 and ordered the State Comptroller to withhold his final $2,083 paycheck.

In 1979, Brown joined the Grumman Corporation as vice president for marketing and was later promoted to senior vice president in charge of the firm's regional offices, becoming the first African American corporate officer in a major U.S. aerospace company.

In March 1994, he was named director for Prudential Securities and managed its Washington public finance office.