Dr. Kennard Brown

In his office in the heart of the University of Tennessee Health Science Center campus, Dr. Kennard Brown looks through a book published in 1986 to celebrate the school’s 75th anniversary.

“What’s conspicuously absent is any substantive noteworthiness of any African American here,” says Brown, executive vice chancellor and chief operations officer for the UTHSC system. “Since then, we’ve gone through a stark revolution concerning race. I think that’s something that we can be very proud of. And I think this is the mandate that Dr. Martin Luther King left us all. We have a social responsibility to offer everybody an equal opportunity to contribute to the greater good.”

Growing up in Hayti, Missouri, and later Chicago, Illinois, Brown remembers, “All I ever wanted to be was a police officer.” His family was mostly sharecropper farmers, “working for the people whose land they lived on,” he says. “But even though they couldn’t read or write, all they talked about was the importance of school.”

Brown listened, saying, “I became convinced that the only pathway was an education.” After high school, he joined the Marine Corps, and then came to Memphis, where he attended the University of Memphis and Southwest Tennessee Community College. “I graduated from both of them the same year,” he says, “with an associate’s degree in psychology and a bachelor’s degree in psychology, with an emphasis on criminal justice.”

Instead of the police force, Brown joined the U.S. Postal Service, working as a postal inspector. Assigned to Miami, he worked the narcotics task force there for six years. “I still had this notion of being a policeman,” he says, “but my wife wanted nothing to do with that, because she knew I’d never be home.” Since her parents lived in Memphis, Brown returned here and enrolled in the Cecil C. Humphreys School of Law, where he earned his juris doctorate.

That’s where he noticed a definite racial dynamic. “There were 22 African Americans in my class when I started law school, and 20 of them washed out the first year.” This was a far higher percentage than white students, and some students expected him to join their protest of discrimination. “I kept thinking, I see the argument you guys want to make,” Brown says, “but I’m nobody. I don’t have any connections. I was just a guy studying at night and doing the best I could do.”

After he graduated, he applied for a clerkship in the law department at UT. Brown remembers “a lot of complaints about discrimination being made to the general counsel’s office. They didn’t really feel like that office interceded or investigated their complaints appropriately.” He had a talk with Chancellor Bill Rice, noting, “In instances of discrimination — and those were pretty frequent — I could offer some solace as an African-American male.”

Brown was hired as the director of affirmative action. “Over about a five-year period, there was an evolutionary shift in the culture,” he says. “It was pretty common to hear the n-word or other pejorative things. And I’m not saying it was all because of me, but in that time when I was director, we became as an institution pretty definitive in terms of what this environment would tolerate.”

A high point in the school’s history came in 2005, when Dr. William F. Owen became the first African-American chancellor at UTHSC. “At the end of my six years as director of affirmative action, one of the things I was most proud of was playing a part in the hiring of Dr. Owen. That was a big step for this institution, and a big step for Memphis, to have an African American in a leadership role.” Although Owen stayed only two years, before he was hired away to a school in New Jersey, “no campus in the entire University of Tennessee system had ever had an African American in charge, and neither has the University of Memphis, Rhodes College, Christian Brother, or other places.”

Brown observes, “Our hiring practices, our admissions policy, and everything else really reflects that change, and how the institution embraced race.” In fact, he says, “In the 20 years that I have been here, we have not had a racial incident of major import on this campus.”

In recent years, UTHSC has gone through other “evolutionary steps,” says Brown, to attract more African Americans as students and faculty members. “Dr. Noma Anderson is the first African American to head up the College of Health Professions. Dr. Marie Chisholm-Burns, dean of the College of Pharmacy, makes a definitive effort to recruit minority students into that college.”

It’s more than just about numbers, though. It’s a quality of life issue. “People generally like to have their care provided by people who look like them,” he observes. Far too many minority patients don’t have a primary-care doctor, but an African-American physician would be more likely to open a practice in predominantly African-American neighborhoods — Whitehaven, Orange Mound, Frayser — than their white counterparts.

“If we can attract more minority professionals, that would mean more healthcare provided to these communities,” says Brown, “and the overall well-being of the people who live there gets better in an evolutionary way.”