Mildred Brown

Mildred Brown
Born	1905 Alabama
Died	1989 Omaha, Nebraska
Occupation	Newspaper publisher, civic activist
Spouse(s)	S. Edward Gilbert (ex)

Mildred D. Brown (1905–1989) was an African-American journalist, newspaper publisher, and leader in the Civil Rights Movement in Omaha, Nebraska. Part of the Great Migration, she came from Alabama via Chicago and Des Moines, Iowa. In Omaha, she and her husband founded and ran the Omaha Star, a newspaper of the African-American community.

After 1945, Brown continued to run alone what was the only African-American newspaper in Omaha. It became the only newspaper of the African-American community in the state. She used its influence for education, community building, supporting the national civil-rights movement and opening up jobs for blacks. In the 1960s President Lyndon Johnson appointed her as a goodwill ambassador to East Germany.

Brown was the first African American and one of only three women inducted into the Omaha Business Hall of Fame. She also has been posthumously inducted into the Nebraska Journalism Hall of Fame (2007) and the newly instituted Omaha Press Club Journalism of Excellence Hall of Fame (2008).

Mildred Brown was born in Bessemer, Alabama in 1905 to Rev. and Mrs. Bennie J. Brown, a prominent African-American family. Her mother was a teacher. They encouraged her education. In 1931 Brown graduated from Miles College (then called Miles Memorial Teachers College), an historically black college (HBCU) founded in Birmingham, Alabama by the Christian Methodist Episcopal Church (CME Church).

Brown worked as a teacher in Birmingham, where she met and married S. Edward Gilbert, a pharmacy graduate of Howard University. They moved to Chicago, where Brown studied at Chicago Normal College, and then to Des Moines, where she took journalism at Drake University. Brown started in journalism and started selling ads and writing news at the Silent Messenger in Sioux City, Iowa, where Gilbert was editor.

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