Anderson Hunt Brown
Anderson Hunt Brown (1880 – 1974), was an American businessman. He was a very successful African-American man in West Virginia. A.H. Brown worked on behalf of citizens and residents of the Charleston Independent School District for the integration of public schools in Brown vs. Board of Education in 1928. In 1928, the high court desegregated the Charleston library in a for A. H. Brown. Willard L. Brown, the son of A. H. Brown, was the lead lawyer for the West Virginia NAACP in the historic U.S. Supreme Court school desegregation ruling in 1954. Generally known as Brown  v. Board of Education, the far-reaching case included West Virginia and 16 other states, and the District of Columbia. Anderson Brown was a and Civil Rights activist. His real estate included primary locations of many of the original businesses in The Block. Mr.Brown was one of the petitioners in a West Virginia lawsuit "Brown vs Kanawha County Board of Education" over the denial of black persons to use the Kanawha County Public Library (West Virginia's own Brown vs Board of Education, like that of the famous Brown vs Board of Education of Topeka, KS). Anderson Hunt Brown  was born in 1880 to former slaves, Henry Arnold Brown & Margaret Stewart Brown. They were freed in 1865 and located in an area known as Dutch Holler, now part of Dunbar WV, where Anderson Hunt Brown was born. Because of the death of a brother, Anderson Brown acquired from his estate some resources to begin going into some form of business for himself. He got into the meat market business as a butcher. He was later able to buy the meat market and began renting a house he owned. Mr. Brown fathered two children – Willard Brown, who became an attorney  and Della Brown Taylor Hardman, who was an artist and became a professor at West Virginia State University. Anderson Hunt Brown, in partnership with Gurnett E. Ferguson, who built the Ferguson Hotel (an African American hotel) on Washington Street, Anderson Brown constructed a building during the middle to late twenties. The original Brown Building adjoined the Ferguson Hotel were two of the major social and economic centers in “The Block”. It was a residential, social, economic, educational and religious center of the African-American population of the city during Jim Crow laws and segregation, as well as the home for  other ethnic groups. In the 1960s a fire partially destroyed the Ferguson Hotel on Washington Street adjoining the original Brown Building. As a result, Mr. Ferguson sold to another hotel business. A second Brown Building located on Shrewsbury Street was built and completed in 1971. Work on the building was done entirely by African American businesses, contractors, and sub-contractors. For a few years before his death in 1974, Mr. Anderson Brown maintained an office in the new building, along with his Attorney son, Willard Brown and his daughter, Della Brown Taylor. Other offices have included a barber shop, doctor 's office, real estate office, and some government offices. Mr. Anderson H. Brown was a civil rights leader in the community who was first involved in a 1928 lawsuit against the Board of Education and the Kanawha Public Library for denying African Americans access to the public library and later with the NAACP locally and nationally. Mr. Brown with the Charleston WV branch of the NAACP initiated a lawsuit against the school district and the library when three African American citizens were refused entry to the public library. They were refused the books, papers and magazines and the right to  sit in the library. The original case was brought before the Circuit Court judge in Kanawha County and the judge ruled that the Board was not in violation of the law. The African American lawyers, along with Anderson H. Brown, took the case to the West Virginia State Supreme Court of Appeals. “The Supreme Court ruled in Anderson Brown's favor by saying that – 'the Board of Education could not exclude colored people from using the Kanawha County Library”.