Peace & Justice Snapshot: Myra Brown of CTA's Anti-Racism Team

When Myra Brown was a teenager in her hometown of Rochester, N.Y., she and her sister came upon a forlorn-looking Hispanic girl of 10 or 11, standing alone on a corner. They asked if she needed help, and the girl, who was holding a small suitcase, said her mother had kicked her out of the house and she didn’t know what to do.

“That’s the way it always was at our house,” says Myra Brown today. “We were always taking in strangers, black, white, brown, it didn’t make any difference. And a lot of them became our extended family. We considered them our sisters and brothers.”

It’s not that her immediate family had an excess of room; Myra was the youngest of eight siblings. And it wasn’t that her mother and father were outwardly very religious; they rarely attended church. “We didn’t talk about why,” says Myra. “I really think that hospitality to those in need was my mother’s way of letting us experience the gospel of Jesus Christ.”

Twenty-five years later, the experience still hasn’t worn off Brown, now 40. As a staff member at Spiritus Christi parish in Rochester, she is committed to the idea that all are brothers and sisters, regardless of race or religion. She is in charge of a range of ministries: to neighborhood youth, to the sick and grieving and to others in life transitions; and naturally she is in charge of parish hospitality. Because of her upbringing, Brown says, “I really don’t know what a stranger is.”

Over the past 10 years, she has been especially active in calling her community to an awareness of racism. She began with an annual series of three-week film festivals on the lingering effects of racism and what to do about it. She also organized year-long workshops for those willing to probe more deeply into institutional racism. Currently, Brown is working on a major Self-Sufficiency Project for African-American families. As she sees it, the project would be supported initially by a federally-insured community development credit union. From this, rental families could become home owners, and local communities could eventually sponsor small businesses, banks, malls, even amusement parks.

Brown is convinced racism is a kind of blindness and that when people are cured, they see and act in a new way. She tells of one man who, during his involvement in her anti-racism workshop, began to question for the first time why the board of directors of a local multi-cultural organization was all-white and always had been. He was himself a member of the board but just hadn’t noticed, says Brown. After feeling at first “an overwhelming sense of grief,” she says, he’s been moving the full board toward painful self-examination.

Besides work in parish and community, Brown has a husband and five children, aged 22 to 14, and several days a week she is a nurse in the brain-injury unit at a Rochester hospital. For inspiration she reads Langston Hughes, Martin Luther King and Maya Angelou, among other writers. She is also writing a book about her family, appropriately titled “From the Seed to the Fruit.”