Page 26 - Historical Dictionary of Political Communication in the United States

BROWN, HUBERT GEROLD
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He was the youngest of five children, whose father died when he was eight.
He dropped out of high school because of lack of interest, except for English,
and through that passion a teacher encouraged him to go into journalism. He
became a reporter for the hometown paper, the Wilmington Morning Star, and
later became a special student in English at the University of North Carolina at
Chapel Hill.
Following World War II, when he worked for the United Press, he went to
a job interview that changed his life. CBS offered him a job in Washington as
a radio broadcaster, but upon returning there he found there wasn't a position.
He walked across the street and got a job at NBC. At NBC, he got his first taste
of political writing as a White House and Capitol Hill correspondent.
With the advent of television, he was offered an opportunity to air stories he
had researched and written. In 1951, he joined the network's early evening news
program called The Camel News Caravan and appeared on the talk show Com-
mentary. Viewers took a liking to Brinkley's style—a blend of objectivity, in-
telligence, precise language, dry tone with wit to match, and thoughtfulness.
In 1956, NBC took a gamble and placed him and Chet Huntley together to
cover the presidential nominating conventions. That pairing lead to a bigger
gamble: using the pair as the anchors for a nightly news program, later called
The Huntley-Brinkley Report. With advances in television technology, Huntley
appeared in New York, and Brinkley in Washington. It ranked as the top news
program for 14 years and won many professional broadcasting awards, including
the George Foster Peabody Award and an Emmy. He has won three Peabody
and ten Emmy Awards.
In 1976, Brinkley became coanchor with John Chancellor, and then Brinkley
became a commentator. In 1981, he moved to ABC and his own program, This
Week with David Brinkley, in which he and other ABC reporters and newscasters
discussed weekly political happenings.

SOURCES: David Brinkley, 11 Presidents, 4 Wars, 22 Political Conventions, 1 Moon
Landing, 3 Assassinations, 2,000 Weeks of News and Other Stuff on TV and 18 Years
of Growing Up in North Carolina, 1995; Current Biography, 1987.
Jacqueline Nash Gifford

BROWN, HUBERT GEROLD (Jamil Abdullah Al-Amin) (1943- ) penned
the autobiographical book Die Nigger Die as a member of the Black Power
movement in the 1960s.
Brown grew up in Baton Rouge and attended Southern University, a black
college. His generation was fed up with the slowness and lack of response to
Dr. Martin Luther King's Civil Rights movement. Instead, Brown and his peers
advocated a "violence for violence" approach to make social changes.
Oddly, Brown did become chairman of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating
Committee (SNCC). However, in this position, he still advocated violence when
met with violence by police officers, coining the statement "violence is as