Cultivating Achievement

Jesse Fleming Brown, '77
May 27, 1931 - September 15, 2019

By Eric Addison, Edited by Henri Banks

At age 81, Jesse Brown recalled his life journey in remarkable detail: from the farm where he grew up in southern Virginia, to the house in Glen Burnie, Maryland, where he resided as a retiree from the federal government. It was all there in the telling: the number of teachers in the segregated grade school he attended in Mount Laurel, Va.; the family history that led to his short matriculation at Virginia Union University where, instead of being drafted into the Army, he joined the Air Force and served honorably for four years. But the enthusiasm in his voice rose a level when he arrived at his contributions to his longtime profession, medical technology, the field in which he obtained his Bachelor of Science in 1977, from Morgan State University.

"I had three articles published (in scientific journals)," said Brown. "I found copies here."

The articles were all published, with Brown as the sole author, during his 32- year tenure as supervisor of medical technologists at Kimbrough Army Community Hospital, at Fort Meade, in Maryland. And all began as suggestions to his superiors about how to improve processes in the chemistry lab. "Simplified Micro-determination of Urea Nitrogen in Serum or Plasma without Deproteinizing" was published in the American Journal of Medical Technology in May 1971. Next was "An Inexpensive Tube Test for Hemoglobin S" in 1990, in the journal of the Society of Armed Forces Medical Laboratory Scientists. The last, "Correlation of the Abbott Spectrum with the Olympus AU5000 for Automated Urine Chemistry Analysis," was published in 2000 in Laboratory Medicine, a journal of the American Society of Clinical Pathology, shortly after his retirement.

Brown, who earned his degree as a part-time student over 16 years, is one of many Morgan graduates who have enriched the world with their work in science, technology, engineering and math (STEM). And he was a standout performer as a donor to Morgan, as well, a role he downplayed. He began with small donations and by 2001, had established a need-based scholarship fund at the Morgan State University Foundation, and in 2011, he established the Jesse F. Brown Endowed Scholarship Fund to benefit students majoring in medical technology or chemistry as well as the Deacon A. Brown Endowed Scholarship Fund to benefit NASA research for the School of Computer, Mathematical, and Natural Sciences. His philanthropic commitment to Morgan is a bequest well over $2 million.

Brown's intention was to find ways to help young people succeed today. "If it hadn't been for people like Dr. Bertha Williams (dean of the evening school at Morgan in the 1970s), I probably wouldn't even have a degree," he said. "What I do now (as a donor to Morgan) is to hopefully help some other students."

It seems Brown had been a cultivator all his life, sowing seeds that slowly produced a good harvest in his career and as a Morgan benefactor.