Edward C. Brown (ca. July 1877–24 January 1928), entrepreneur, was born in Philadelphia, the son of Robert Brown and Anna M. Cooper Brown. His father was one of the first African American policemen in Philadelphia, and a sister became one of the first professional Black librarians in the public library system of Cincinnati. Brown attended local schools and the Spencerian Business College in Philadelphia before working first as a mail clerk and then as a stenographer for a white official of the National Railway Company. He must have held that job only briefly before moving to Newport News, where he was listed as an insurance agent in an 1897–1898 city directory. Brown later stated that when he arrived in Virginia he worked as a waiter in a resort hotel. The 1900 census gave his occupation as a real estate agent, even though he was then still a lodger. Apparently Brown added about seven years to his age when he reported to the census taker, perhaps to lend credibility to his business reputation, and he also added several years to his age on 29 August 1901 when he married Estelle A. Smith, of Hampton. They had no children.

On 1 November 1905 Brown and four other men obtained a charter for E. C. Brown, Incorporated, with the declared intention of dealing in insurance and real estate. Black capitalists faced nearly insuperable obstacles. Real estate and banking markets were restricted to the segregated Black community, African Americans had limited access to capital for investment, and young people entering business had few opportunities to gain experience. To bolster his new business, Brown published at least one issue of the Dollar Mark (June 1906), a magazine that carried articles encouraging thrift, arguing for investment in African American enterprises, and explaining why stock in E. C. Brown, Incorporated, would be a good investment. On 10 June 1908 he opened the Crown Savings Bank in Newport News, with capital of $5,000. The bank's success spurred Brown's ambitions. He established the Brown Savings Bank in Norfolk on 10 April 1909, followed later by the Beneficial Insurance Company of Norfolk and by the Brown Realty Company, probably a branch of E. C. Brown, Incorporated.

Brown soon looked beyond Tidewater. Retaining his business associations in Virginia, he returned to Philadelphia in 1913 and started a real estate company there. In partnership with Andrew F. Stevens, a respected local political and civic leader in the African American community, Brown established the Home Extension and Insurance Association. In 1915 the partners founded the private banking firm of Brown and Stevens. Business was good. Full employment during World War I and the many African Americans who moved from the South to Philadelphia brought Brown customers who borrowed money to buy houses and had wages sufficient enough to open savings accounts. The bank's advertisements emphasized the institution's growth as evidence of its stability and exhorted customers to develop the habit of thrift.

Success seemed to expand Brown's ambitions. He created the Quality Amusement Corporation, which operated the legendary Lafayette Theater in New York City and controlled theaters in several other cities, including Newport News and Norfolk. In 1917 he formed the Payton Apartments Corporation to purchase a New York apartment complex valued at nearly $1 million. To finance these and other ventures, Brown invested his bank's funds and borrowed against his properties, climbing an ever-steeper ladder of mortgages. Compounding the situation, he and his wife acquired expensive tastes. Salesmen from Bonwit Teller reportedly brought gowns to the Brown household so that Estelle Brown could select her finery free from the snubs that Black customers often faced in public. His cream-colored Stutz and her Pierce Arrow automobiles helped lend credence to the gossip.

The nation suffered an economic recession after World War I, and Brown's empire cracked. His Quality Amusement Corporation failed, and its expensive theaters had to be sold at a loss. Brown liquidated his Virginia properties and concentrated on his bank and his real estate in New York and Philadelphia. The bank's solvency came into question as a result of its bad investments and expensive loans, leading to a run on the bank by nervous depositors on 7 February 1925. Because the bank's assets were tied up in real estate, Brown could not halt the panic. On 10 February 1925 the Brown and Stevens Bank collapsed, bringing down two branch banks and taking with it the savings of thousands of depositors. A bank examiner regarded it as "the greatest example of irresponsibility" he had ever encountered. Even the bank building itself had several mortgages on it. To maintain his honor, Stevens gave up his own property and wealth to restore what little he could of the lost savings, but in stark contrast only a judge's restraining order prevented Brown from conveying his remaining assets to his wife to protect them from the bank's creditors.

Without a word of contrition, Brown fled to New York City to escape public anger. Remembered in the North only as a cautionary example of spectacular failure, Brown left a more enduring institutional legacy in Virginia. In 1919 the Brown Savings Bank in Norfolk changed its name to the Metropolitan Bank and Trust Company and in 1922 merged with the Tidewater Bank and Trust Company to become the nation's largest Black-owned financial institution. Despite its size the bank could not survive the Great Depression and closed forever in June 1933. The much smaller Crown Savings Bank continued to operate in Newport News until 4 September 1964.

The collapse of his enterprises ruined his health, and Edward C. Brown died of kidney failure and heart disease on 24 January 1928 in a tenement in New York City. He was buried in the Eden Cemetery in Philadelphia, but no obituary appeared in that city's Black newspaper.

Sources Consulted:
Birth date not recorded in Philadelphia; biographies in W. N. Hartshorn, ed., An Era of Progress and Promise, 1863–1910 (1910), 472–473 (portrait; gives 1876 year of birth), and National Cyclopedia of the Colored Race (1919), 452–453 (portrait; gives 1877 year of birth); United States Census Schedules, Census, Warwick Co., 1900 (gives July 1870 birth date), Records of the Bureau of the Census, Record Group 29, National Archives and Records Administration, Washington, D.C.; Marriage Register, Elizabeth City Co. (gives age as twenty-seven on 29 Aug. 1901), Bureau of Vital Statistics, Commonwealth of Virginia Department of Health, Record Group 36, Library of Virginia (LVA); New York City Bureau of Records, Death Certificate, signed 24 Jan. 1928 (gives age as fifty); family information in Wendell P. Dabney, Cincinnati's Colored Citizens: Historical, Sociological and Biographical (1926), 321; information provided by Dorothy Warrick Taylor; State Corporate Commission Charter Book, 58:22–24, 66:65–66, Record Group 112, LVA; Abram L. Harris, The Negro as Capitalist: A Study of Banking and Business Among American Negroes (1936), 84–88, 125–143; Earl Lewis, In Their Own Interests: Race, Class, and Power in Twentieth-Century Norfolk, Virginia (1991), 44–45, 122–123; Alexander Crosby Brown, ed., Newport News' 325 Years: A Record of the Progress of a Virginia Community (1946), 253–254; Norfolk Journal and Guide, 4 Mar. 1922, 14 May 1927, 20 Jan. 1951, 12 Sept. 1964; financial troubles detailed almost weekly in Philadelphia Tribune, 14 Feb. 1925 through 1926 (quotation, 21 Mar. 1925); obituaries in New York Age and Norfolk Journal and Guide, both 28 Jan. 1928, and New York Amsterdam News, 1 Feb. 1928.

Photograph in Era of Progress (1910).

Written for the Dictionary of Virginia Biography by John T. Kneebone.

How to cite this page:
John T. Kneebone, "Edward C. Brown (1877–1928)," Dictionary of Virginia Biography, Library of Virginia (1998– ), published 2001 (http://www.lva.virginia.gov/public/dvb/bio.asp?b=Brown_Edward_C., accessed [today's date]).

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