Milbert Brown Jr.

2025

By Ray E. Boomhower

As a shy second-grade student at Beveridge Elementary School in Gary, Milbert Brown Jr. had his confidence boosted by a kind teacher who gave him the assignment as “classroom reporter.” Thrilled at his new role, Brown ran home and told his mother that he had a new dream, attending college so he could pursue a career as a reporter. By the age of 12, he had earned enough money selling copies of Gritmagazine to his neighbors to buy his first camera, using it to photograph and write about his family.

Telling stories about America and the world has been part of Brown’s life ever since. His journalism career has taken him to South Africa to cover its first-ever all-color presidential election and the inauguration of Nelson Mandela, to Liberia as a United Nations Overseas Reporting Fellow, to the groundbreaking campaign of Sen. Barack Obama for president, and to the Olympic Games in Atlanta, London and Paris.

Bob Black, a fellow photojournalist and National Association of Black Journalists Hall of Famer, noted in nominating Brown for the Indiana Journalism Hall of Fame that he has always seen “what needs to be done and sets out to do it. He gets things done.” What is more admirable, and sets Brown apart, Black added, is that “he shares his dream and brings others along so that he is not alone in the spotlight.”

The first Black picture editor at the Chicago Tribune, where in 2001 he and his colleagues received a Pulitzer Prize for explanatory reporting, Brown got his start working as a reporter for the newspaper at Gary’s Westside High School. Promoted to sports editor, he earned a scholarship to study journalism at Ball State University’s high school summer journalism workshop, where he worked on its newspaper, the Grapevine.

He continued his journalism studies at Ball State, working as a paste-up assistant on the student newspaper, the Daily News, from 5 to 10 p.m. in the newspaper’s basement. Hoping to get out of the basement, he became a paid staff photographer for the newspaper. At the age of 18, he earned his first internship in newspaper journalism, working at his hometown Gary Post-Tribune. He also served as photo editor for the Black Voice, the campus’ Black Student Association newspaper, before graduating from Ball State in 1978.

Noted photographer Gordon Parks, who contributed iconic photo essays for Life magazine, served as an inspiration for Brown.

“He had a fancy camera, similar to one I had, and he was an African American,” Brown said of Parks in an interview in Ohio Today magazine in 2024. “Not only was he a good photographer, he was a good writer. I said, ‘I want to be like that guy, Gordon Parks,’ so I ran to the library and got his book, A Choice of Weapons, and I read it.”

Although he started out teaching high school journalism, Brown left the classroom to enter graduate school at Ohio University, which, he noted, had a national reputation for producing “some of the finest photojournalists in America.” While at Ohio, he accepted internships at the Dayton Journal Herald, the Dallas Times Herald, the Louisville Courier-Journal, and, after a call from its executive editor, Ben Bradlee, the Washington Post. The university, he remembered for Ohio Today, became “the springboard to jump into the big ocean” of American journalism.

Brown’s photojournalism career included positions at the Boston Globe, where he covered the area’s professional sports teams, including the Celtics, Red Sox and New England Patriots. In 1991, he joined the Chicago Tribune as its assistant picture editor, managing visual news content for the newspaper.

Jeffrey L. Williams, who worked closely with Brown at the Tribune and supported his nomination to the hall of fame, marveled at his friend’s “creativity, his photo artistry and his unflinching desire to capture images that, above all else, showed the truth.” Williams went on to note that Brown’s approach to any assignment, large or small, was “simple but direct: Get the best, fairest images possible, with sensitivity to the subjects -- before deadline.” 

While working in Chicago, Brown restarted his teaching career as an adjunct professor at Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism. Even after retiring from the newspaper, he continued to teach, guiding students as a professor at two leading historically Black colleges and universities, Howard and Wilberforce. He also earned a doctorate in higher education leadership from Morgan State University.

Throughout his career, Brown, who today makes his home in Maryland, has contributed articles to several Black-owned magazines, including Jet, Vibe, Ebony, ABOUT…TIME and Crisis. He also served as the international editor for Oracle magazine, the membership publication for the Omega Psi Phi Fraternity.

“His heart is in developing and presenting the stories of the tenacity and courage that are hallmarks of our survival as people of color who build communities and institutions wherever we settle down,” said Carolyne Scott Blount, executive editor at ABOUT…TIME. Such stories, she pointed out, offer “a great and lasting value by leaving an historical trail that can support future research and book projects.”

In 2003 Brown published the genealogical book Family Treasures: Memoirs of the Blanchard Family. The book, which includes slave records, rare photographs and oral histories, traced a Black family’s history from its 1690 French roots through slavery in Mississippi to the beginning of the 21st century. 

Since January 2009, Brown has been the principal consultant for Brown Images, an independent multimedia company that manages design, photography and writing projects. His work has been exhibited at galleries and universities across the country and is part of the permanent collections at the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture, the Chicago History Museum and North Carolina A&T State University. He was inducted into the National Association of Black Journalists Hall of Fame in 2024.

With the support of the National Endowment for the Humanities, Brown is working on a book project, Breaking Barriers: A Digital Exploration of the Negro Leagues and Their Impact on Baseball History, that chronicles the enduring influence of the Negro Leagues in America’s Jim Crow Era.