Brown and his three siblings were raised Roman Catholic and attended St. Peter Claver Church in St. Paul, an African-American parish.
Because of the stock market crash of that year no steel jobs could be had, so Brown found work of a different sort: at the age of 16 he became a Communist labor organizer.
[1] Lloyd Brown spent the next decade as a labor organizer in Ohio, New Jersey, Connecticut, and Pennsylvania, and also visited the Soviet Union as a journalist.
In 1951 Brown published a novel, Iron City, based on his experiences in Allegheny County Jail, the fictionalized tale of his and other inmates’ efforts to save Willie Jones, condemned to death for murder.
Brown began working with Paul Robeson in 1950, helped him write his column for the Harlem newspaper, Freedom, and 1958 his autobiography, Here I Stand.