The Many Lives Of Ms. Dora Lee Brown

If you’ve spent any time in the Hill in the past 52 years, you probably know Ms. Dora Lee Brown.

You might not know how many lives she has lived, the history she has helped make or the wisdom she has honed after decades of fearlessly speaking up and breaking barriers.

“You need to get some credentials while you’re fighting for your rights,” Brown told the Independent during a four-hour interview at her Asylum Street home on Saturday afternoon. ​“You can’t demand anything if you don’t have credentials.”

She has credentials. Both formal and unofficial.

Since January 1966, Brown has lived in a two-story, mint green house on Asylum Street, just around the corner from the old Jewish Home for the Aged on Davenport Avenue, a five-minute walk from the Yale School of Medicine campus on Cedar Street.

Brown, 81, has lived many lives since first moving to New Haven from her birthplace of Paducah, Kentucky, in the mid-1960s.

A trained scientist with a graduate degree in microbiology, she spent two years doing lab research in cellular and molecular biology at the Yale School of Medicine. She spent nearly four decades working in the entomology and regulatory divisions of the Connecticut Agricultural Experiment Station on Huntington Street in East Rock. She was an active member of the Connecticut Entomological Society.

For her first 16 years in the city, she worked a second job on nights and weekends as a clerk at the Malley’s department store downtown.

Outside of work, she served on the board of the Hill Development Corporation with such leading Hill neighborhood activists as Walter Brooks, Samuel Foster and Tomas Reyes. She is an active member of the Alpha Kappa Alpha sorority, traveling throughout the country for annual leadership conferences.

In her ​“retirement,” she hasn’t let up. For years, Brown has been a stalwart of the Hill North and Hill South community management teams. At each month’s meetings at Career High School and Betsy Ross School respectively, she can be found with her two long, wooden canes, adamantly challenging local politicians to step up their work on clearing up blight and drug-related crime from the neighborhood.

The daughter of a civil rights activist who led the Paducah, Kentucky, branch of the NAACP for three decades, Brown has endured racist resistance to her mere existence as a professionally minded, African-American, single woman at nearly every step of her life.

But in sharp distinction to what she sees as a mindset of perpetual victimhood stoked by liberal identity politics, she said, she firmly believes that African-Americans should forsake street protests and calls for a more stable social safety net. She said the community should instead work towards getting a good education and good jobs. She has no patience for crime and blight and the people who perpetuate them, whether they be black or white.

Tucked away in her home on Asylum Street, she is not just a figure of history, but an active member of the Hill’s political present.

Here are a few stories of where Ms. Brown came from, and of where’s she’s going still.

Daughter Of The Civil Rights Movement

Dora Lee Brown was born in 1937 in Paducah, a small city on the banks of the Ohio river. As Brown noted, Paducah is nothing like the Blue Mountain country of Eastern Kentucky, home to coal mines and Loretta Lynn.

On the very western edge of the state, Paducah is just miles away from Missouri and Southern Illinois. Its residents often leave home for the Midwestern industrial capitals (and popular sites of early 20th century African American migration) like Chicago and Illinois. When she was growing up, Brown said, African-Americans in her area of Western Kentucky and Southern Illinois faced as much racism as African-Americans in the Mississippi Delta.

Brown’s father, Curlee Brown, Sr., was born in Hollandale, Mississippi. After his parents divorced, his father took him to Arkansas, and then to Paducah.

A graduate of Western Kentucky Vocational College, where he learned carpentry and cabinet-making, Curlee Brown was a staunch advocate for integrated education. He soon attracted the eyes of local civil rights leaders, and would go on to serve as the president of the Paducah branch of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) from 1946 until his death in 1976.

“He was fearless,” Brown recalled.

After a successful five year-fight in state court for the desegregation of Paducah Junior College (PJC), Brown’s eldest son, Curlee Brown, Jr., would become the first black student to graduate from PJC in the early 1950s.

In 1957, Brown’s second oldest child, Dora Lee, would become the second black graduate of the local junior college.

Brown said she remembered white students kicking her chair in class and whispering, ​“Nigger go home!” White teachers who overheard the insults did nothing.

Brown would not let the racial abuse get to her.

“I’m not trying to be friends with these people,” she recalled. ​“I’m not trying to go home with them. So, what the hell do they care if I’m here at school? My attitude is: ​‘To hell with you.’ I was not scared. I was ticked. And I didn’t allow myself to stay ticked for more than a minute.”

“I knew I was somebody,” she continued. ​“All those people around me [her father, family, more supportive teachers, the NAACP] told me that without saying it. I trained myself never to react, not to let it get to you.”

As a teenager, Brown traveled throughout the Midwest with her father, her younger brother Donald, and her father’s colleagues to NAACP meetings in big cities like Detroit and Chicago.

In 1957 she and her father and younger brother went up to Detroit to listen to a fast-rising civil rights leader named Martin Luther King, Jr. speak at the city’s convention center. People lined up for miles and miles outside of the center, hoping for a chance to get in to hear the young reverend speak.

Sixty years later, Brown said, what she remembers most about Dr. King’s speech was his voice.

“That voice mesmerizes me anyway,” she said. ​“He gave a speech of hope and encouragement, the usual stuff. But I was like this the whole time” — she opened her eyes wide and dropped her jaw. ​“He’s got this booming voice that captures you. I don’t know how to explain it other than that.”

Brown also met national leaders of the civil rights movement at these meetings, men whom she’d only read about in the NAACP printed digest. She remembered meeting longtime Detroit NAACP head Gloster Current at one of the meetings. She was struck by how the adults always engaged seriously with the younger people, making it clear that the hard work they were doing was all to ensure a better future for their kids.

She recalled that they never complained, and they always got across what they expected from the next generation: hard work, discipline and self-respect.

As a student, Dora Lee loved three subjects: biology, home economics and physical education. She was the captain of the girl’s basketball team at her high school, and loved sewing and the textile industry. Ultimately, she decided to pursue microbiology at Southern Illinois University – Carbondale, just 90 miles up the Ohio River from Paducah.

“I can enjoy” athletics and home ec, she said, remembering why she settled on microbiology and a career in science, ​“except you have to have a degree to work in science.”

“Don’t Be Talking Around Her—
She’s A Science Major”

In the summer of 1961, Dora Lee Brown, then 24, was working on her undergraduate and graduate degrees in microbiology at the Carbondale campus of Southern Illinois University (SIU).

During her first summer living away from home, she was shot in the side by a man with mental health problems who lived on her block.

Brown woke up early one weekday morning to finish registering for classes so that she would have plenty of time to get to her afternoon job at a campus bookstore. As she walked down the street in Carbondale’s small but tight-knit African-American community, she was followed by a neighbor whom everyone on the block knew struggled with mental illness.

She remembers turning around and seeing his eyes twitching like a Bugs Bunny cartoon before he pulled a handgun from his pocket. She dropped her books and started backing up towards the streetcorner. She felt a flick against the side of her abdomen. The man put his gun away, walked back to his porch, and sat down.

Not knowing what to do and not yet aware that she had been shot, Brown decided to tell her neighbor’s landlord about the incident later in the afternoon. She bent down to pick up her books. ​“That’s when all hell broke loose on my insides.”

She was rushed to a nearby hospital and woke up surrounded by her family, who had all come up from Paducah. The bullet had torn up her large intestine. For two weeks, she said, the doctors and nurses did not know if she would live or die.

“Don’t be talking around her,” she remembered one of the nurses saying as her colleagues discussed Brown’s diagnosis in front of her. ​“She’s a science major.”

Brown’s surgery was successful. She spent a year recuperating and working two part-time jobs down in Paducah, then returned to SIU the following year.

“I was only concerned about getting back to school,” she remembered thinking.

At SIU, she completed undergraduate and graduate degrees in microbiology. In 1965, at the insistence of her brother Donald, who had studied Chinese at Yale University through a program sponsored by the U.S. Air Force, she applied for and got a job doing cellular and molecular biology research at a lab at the Yale School of Medicine.

For two years she worked in labs on Cedar Street, studying the tissue culture of monkey kidneys. After spending a year living in West Haven with friends of her brother, in January 1966 she rented the second-floor apartment of her current house on Asylum Street, which was then owned by the only African-American family on the block. When her landlords divorced in 1967, the owner sold the home to Brown, who has lived in that same second-floor apartment for the past 52 years.

She has not had a tenant on the first floor since the early 1970s. She said that she stopped renting out the room because she was tired of having to chase down people for their monthly rent.

The only black woman working in her lab, she remembered being treated with respect and admiration by her colleagues and chief scientist, who praised her for her diligent work.

But at one of the labs she worked at upon first arriving at Yale, there were two white high school students who resented her advanced education. They taunted her and tried to pressure her to leave the lab.

“I don’t care how you feel about me,” she remembered thinking. ​“I’m here to work. You’re not going to run me away. If I let you bother me for more than a second, then it’s my problem. I’m the stupid one.”

When her chief researcher at her lab left Yale and she was going to be transferred to another lab, she applied for and got a job at the Connecticut Agricultural Experiment Station, a state scientific and agricultural research center on Huntington Street in East Rock.

For ten years she worked in an entomology lab with Dr. Charles Doane. For the next nearly 30 years she traveled throughout the state, studying the many insects that inhabit Connecticut’s hardwood forests. She retired in 2003.

Her work focused in particular on the gypsy moth, an invasive forest pest that wreaked havoc on Connecticut’s oak, hickory, and elm-treed forests from the 1960s through the 1980s.

To combat the gypsy moth infestation, Brown followed a professional routine that involved intensive lab work and regular travel. She and her colleagues developed a bacterium that discouraged moth proliferation.

She remembered flying in an airplane across the state, helping create an aerial map of the different potential areas of infestation in the state’s many hardwood forests. She and her colleagues would then travel the state on foot, inspecting up close just what might be the cause of the blight that they had sighted from high up in the sky.

When they had singled out an area affected by gypsy moths, the department would hire helicopter pilots (sometimes from an all-women’s helicopter outfit based out of Ohio) to fly over the state and release a spray that contained that bacterium, with the hope of eradicating the infestation.

Before the helicopter pilots could spray the woods, Brown and her colleagues had to secure the consent of the political leaders of the affected town.

Though she found the forests and small towns of northwestern Connecticut beautiful and peaceful to hike through, she often found that some residents were none too happy to have a single black female representative of the state traversing their property. She said that she was once threatened by a man with a shotgun. She said that another time, a local sheriff called her supervisor and said that he had to investigate reports of a black woman walking around the woods in his town.

With a smile and a sharp peal of laughter, Brown remembered what her supervisor said to the sheriff: ​“That ain’t no black woman. That’s Dora!”

“My dad never allowed us to become bitter,” she remembers. She said that when she faced racial animosity during her work, she just felt sorry for white folks who do not have anything to hold on to but their racial animus.

“The Bitch With The Bat”

Outside of her work as a scientist, Brown has long been involved in neighborhood organizations dedicated to the economic revitalization of the Hill.

She was a member of a Davenport Avenue block watch, then a regular attendee at the Upper Hill Area Project, through which Yale-New Haven Hospital employees worked with Hill residents to combat area crime and blight. She served on the board of the Hill Development Corporation, and worked closely with Hill activists like Walter Brooks, Samuel Foster and Tomas Reyes, a former Board of Alders president who is currently Mayor Toni Harp’s Chief of Staff.

Brown said that she had always wanted to work in one of the grocery stores or department stories downtown when she was growing up in Paducah, but that none of them would hire black people. So when she moved to New Haven to work as a professional scientist, she secured a second, part-time job as a clerk at Malley’s department store on Church Street. (The store closed in the early ​‘80s.)

In the 1980s, working and middle-class families fled Asylum Street. Her block was overcome by the local leader of a drug gang.

“This was like a circus every single night,” she said, referring to the predominantly white customers who came to Asylum Street to buy drugs after dark.

“We need to understand, I don’t care what problems people are having,” she said. ​“I don’t care if you’re living in an outhouse. You have a responsibility to someone else living next to you, and we want a decent neighborhood.”

She said that she would regularly stand by her front door with a baseball bat, staring out at the people waiting in their cars to pick up drugs. She remembered walking up to one car, tapping the windows with the bat, and saying that that customer could not park outside of her place to buy drugs.

Thereafter, she developed a nickname on the block as ​“the bitch with the bat.” She said that her neighbors resented her for not mixing with them, for coming home and shutting the door.

In addition to her jobs, she was an assistant church clerk, taught a primary Sunday school class, served as Sunday school pianist, and worked closely with her sorority, Alpha Kappa Alpha. She said she had no time or interest in befriending the people she saw as bringing down the block.

In retaliation, she said, her neighbors would routinely throw cans and paper plates on her front lawn. They’d steal the hosta plants she had planted in her front yard.

Today, Ms. Brown attends every Hill North and Hill South Community Management Team meeting. She regularly spars with Hill political and management team leadership, urging the group to encourage people to pursue education and employment instead of what she sees as government hand-outs.

“My dad told me when we were growing up: Nobody owes you a thing,” she said. ​“You have to achieve in life. You can’t be occupied with the fact that you are descended from slaves. Who cares? This is now.”

Brown planned to spend the day after this interview walking around the Hill with fellow neighborhood activist Hector Miranda and a representative from City Hall, showing the city employee seriously cracked sidewalks that have not been repaired for over two years.

At the beginning of her ninth decade alive and well into her retirement, Brown said she ultimately plans on moving back to Kentucky, where she has family in Louisville. She currently makes the trip there at least once or twice a year, driving by herself through Connecticut, New York, Pennsylvania, Ohio, and Kentucky.

But for now, she’s staying in her home on Asylum Street. She is currently redoing the tiles in her kitchen. She regularly takes walks around the Albertus Magnus track and through East Rock Park, where she quizzes herself on different types of trees by just looking at their bark.

“At 81,” she said, ​“you better keep moving.”

When asked what she would like to see out of the next generation of leaders in the Hill, she looked back to her roots as the daughter of a West Kentucky civil rights leader.

“When I came up, the point was: Get yourself credentials,” she said. ​“Then you can stand up and demand. I don’t care if your ancestors were slaves. If you ain’t got no credentials, how can you demand a job or a position? You can’t do it.”