If statues honoring the previous DuSable Substantial School’s most revered alumni were erected in front of 4900 S. Wabash Ave., “Sweet” Charlie Brown would be standing in bronze along with Nat King Cole, Mayor Harold Washington and Sweetwater Clifton, the first Black player to indication a deal to enjoy in the NBA.
Like Clifton, Brown was a basketball player. But he was that and a complete lot additional.
Brown was a star on the DuSable staff that lost to Mount Vernon in the 1954 point out title sport remembered as the “most controversial” video game in IHSA event record, the stellar sidekick of superstar Elgin Baylor on the Seattle College crew that completed next in the 1958 NCAA Match, an esteemed large university referee, and co-founder and guiding light-weight of the Windy City Senior Basketball League.
“If it all finished tomorrow I will have appreciated much more than any NBA All-Star ever did,” Brown wrote in a 2008 letter to Invoice Frey, a single of the multitude of close friends he made by means of the Windy Metropolis Senior League and its summer time national match, the Windy City Shootout.
Brown died Friday, Aug. 26, at St. Francis Healthcare facility in Evanston, where he was taken immediately after a fall two days previously at Peterson Park Overall health Care Middle. Immediately after residing on the South Side for almost all of his adult everyday living, he was taken to the centre on the North Aspect in late July due to the fact of critical respiratory challenges and other well being challenges. He was 86.
Born in Canton, Miss out on., on Feb. 24, 1936, Brown came to Chicago before he started out elementary university at Betsy Ross on the South Aspect.
He manufactured his 1st physical appearance in the public eye in the course of his junior yr at DuSable when he was a single of the most effective players on coach Artwork Scher’s team that reached the very first spherical of the 1953 point out match prior to getting rid of to eventual condition winner Lyons and ending with a 27-3 history.
The next season Scher left to mentor Sullivan. Jim Brown replaced Scher at DuSable, inheriting a solid of standouts that also bundled Paxton Lumpkin, Shellie McMillon, Karl Dennis and McKinley Cowson and midyear graduates Curley Johnson and Bobby Jackson.
“We felt that we ended up on the verge of a little something excellent,” Brown explained to the Chicago Sun-Occasions in 2004. “The young ones took satisfaction in the reality that they have been Black and had a Black coach. A new period began in the town with Black children starting to dominate the recreation.”
Indicative of that dominance was DuSable’s frequent-time showdown with Roosevelt, a further Chicago powerhouse designed up of all white gamers. Brown scored 34 factors to lead DuSable to a double-overtime victory that determined the Chicago Community League championships and would have prolonged-phrase ramifications.
Looking for to turn into the to start with CPL and initial all-Black staff to win the point out championship, unbeaten DuSable routed Bowen, Quincy and Edwardsville in the event to established the stage for the title recreation versus Mount Vernon.
Not only that, “DuSable would have been the initially all-Black workforce in the United States to earn a higher faculty condition basketball championship,” according to Bruce Firchau, chairman of the Illinois Basketball Coaches Affiliation and Museum.
DuSable led by 4 points with 4 minutes to participate in before Mount Vernon rallied to acquire 76-70.
Calls by referees were being a component. Three baskets by Brown on extensive photographs had been waived off due to the fact of traveling calls, and Lumpkin was identified as for charging on two instances immediately after creating shots. In the remaining three minutes, Brown, Lumpkin and Dennis fouled out.
According to longtime Sunshine-Moments prep author Taylor Bell, “It was, by most accounts, the most controversial championship match in the record of the Illinois large school basketball event.”
“I hold no bitterness,” Brown later on reflected. “I realized much more from that a single loss than all the wins. It taught me how to offer with realities in our modern society and learn how to take them. I uncovered how to offer with what lifestyle is all about.”
Brown went on to participate in faculty basketball on the freshman staff at Indiana — NCAA rules at the time prevented freshmen from actively playing varsity — and he invested the 1st 50 % of his sophomore season as a significant contributor for the varsity squad right before leaving.
Brown was recruited by Seattle mentor John Castellani and, right after sitting out a season in compliance with NCAA transfer regulations, played a robust supporting position to Baylor when the group innovative to the 1958 national championship match prior to losing to Kentucky.
In the West Location championship recreation towards California, Brown scored the basket that sent the contest into overtime. With 10 seconds remaining in additional time, he scored the basket that sealed the 66-62 victory.
When Baylor remaining for the NBA the future season, Brown turned the leading player on a workforce that completed with a 23-6 record. He was chosen to quite a few All-The united states groups.
Brown was chosen by the Cincinnati Royals as the 74th over-all select in the 1959 NBA draft through an period in which most of the league’s eight groups experienced unwritten quotas on the variety of Black players on their rosters.
But Brown chose not to attempt to perform in the NBA. He returned to Chicago immediately after serving in the U.S. Army and performed semi-professional basketball, as nicely as worked as a social worker for the YMCA on the West Side, wherever he was committed to bringing with each other associates of rival gangs to take care of their discrepancies.
In 1975, he commenced a next basketball job as a referee, officiating two superior school championship game titles: King’s 79-71 victory about Rockford Guilford in 1993, and in 1994 when Peoria Guide edged Carbondale 61-60. He also worked many metropolis championship contests.
Brown took fantastic satisfaction in his operate.
“I wasn’t heading to permit what took place to me occur to these youthful men,” he when reflected, looking back on the controversial 1954 loss to Mount Vernon. “They said the officers cheated (DuSable) but I would in no way use that term. I say: ‘They created some problems.’”
Another significant chapter in Brown’s everyday living began in the 1980s when he was contacted by legal professional Mickey Rotman, a previous Roosevelt player who went on to grow to be president of the Chicago Community Significant University Alumni Affiliation. Rotman proposed he and the other members of the Roosevelt workforce that misplaced to DuSable hold a reunion video game to raise cash for both equally universities.
Brown welcomed the concept. A evening meal celebration at the East Lender Club preceded the activity and the former rivals bonded. The reunion game led to word-of-mouth pickup video games and then to the players’ participation in nationwide tournaments for players in excess of age 50.
“We can do this regionally,” Brown told his skeptical fellow gamers.
The initial Windy Town Shootout was held in the summer time of 1991 and in the wintertime of 1995 the Windy Senior Basketball League was born. (The league was revived in 2022 immediately after a two-12 months hiatus simply because of COVID-19.)
Brown played in the league — headquartered at Washington Park with satellite venues generally on the South Aspect — for nearly 20 many years and till the pandemic served as its de facto commissioner.
Amid the former NBA gamers who have performed in the league are Ricky Inexperienced, Flynn Robinson, Mickey Johnson, Harvey Catchings and Sonny Parker. Also on the VIP list are various notables from other walks of lifestyle these types of as Secretary of Point out Jesse White and previous State’s Legal professional Dick Devine.
“We have had our life enriched by the encounters we have experienced and it is all thanks to Charlie,” the late Barry Holt, just one of the league’s founding fathers, wrote in a Windy Town Shootout plan piece. “Charlie touched our life in strategies we would not believe were being doable.”
Wanting back again a couple several years in the past, Brown reminisced: “We started out with a crew of guys and now we have a large family. I’ve gotten more out of basketball just after 50 than I possibly could have imagined.
“I was in the middle of the social transform our place was likely by in 1954. I know what the variation is before, for the duration of and immediately after that. I am savoring the residuals. You never have to be an Uncle Tom, you really do not have to be a Malcom X, you don’t have to be a Martin Luther King. Just be oneself and find the most effective approach for the problem you’re in.
“We’re all a person household. Everybody has to appear at it that way.”
Visitation will be Thursday from noon to 7 p.m. and at 10 a.m. on Friday at Travis Funeral Home in Riverdale. Funeral services will be held at 11 a.m. at Shekinah Chapel in Riverdale.
Brown is survived by his daughter Rosalind, granddaughters Ryann and Grace, and grandsons Rawlin and Justin. Preceding him in demise ended up his brothers Reginald, Leroy and Herb. He was divorced but he and his previous wife, Shirley, remained close pals right up until her loss of life.
Neil Milbert is a freelance reporter who coated athletics for the Chicago Tribune for 46 decades.
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