The Lesson

Growing up in Washington, D.C., in the 1980s, Tracey L. Brown was a preteen Prince fanatic whose parents paid for her to take clarinet lessons. She hated them. After four weeks, she says, “I told my father I wanted to quit, and he said I needed more stick-to-itiveness.”

The clarinet lessons went away. But the term stick-to-itiveness? That stuck.

“He always used it,” says Brown, of her late father Ron Brown, a trailblazer in the Democratic Party who served under President Clinton as Secretary of Commerce from 1993 to 1996. “Even if your first stab at something doesn’t turn out exactly how you want it, it doesn’t mean you give up. Just keep sticking to it, keep plugging away, think outside the box, and you’ll get there.’

“I do a lot of mediation,” she adds, “and it really helps to stick with it and not give up.” With a smile, she says, “Unlike me playing clarinet.”

A graduate of Boston College and St. John’s University School of Law, and the former deputy district attorney for the County of Los Angeles, Tracey Brown has won multiple million-dollar settlements and verdicts and served as senior counsel at the Federal Trade Commission, where she litigated fraud cases. Since 2003 she has led The Cochran Firm’s employment law practice, focusing on employment discrimination, civil rights, and law enforcement misconduct.

“The more things change, the more they stay the same,” says Brown, of the problem of unjustified law enforcement violence in the country. “There have been moments in time where it seems like there’s a reckoning, and that some folks are getting justice for what’s happened for their family members. Then a week later, something similar happens somewhere else.”

The lack of accountability within departments is particularly frustrating, she says. “So those officers continue to, unfortunately, violate so many citizens’ civil rights,” she says.

He was someone who could sit down and break bread with complete strangers. —Tracey L. Brown on her father Ron

Brown’s civil rights work runs in the family. Her book, The Life and Times of Ron Brown, published in 1998, was written after her father was killed in a plane crash, along with 34 others, in Croatia in 1996. It celebrates his life: his beginnings in Harlem, his tenacious work with the National Urban League, his work on the presidential campaign of Ted Kennedy in 1980 and Jesse Jackson in 1988. He was often “the first”: the first Black officer to serve in his Army unit, the first Black leader of the Democratic National Committee, the first Black secretary of commerce.

“I’m still missing him every day,” says Tracey, who serves on the board of the Ronald H. Brown Center for Civil Rights and Economic Development at St. John’s University School of Law and the advisory board of the Ron Brown Scholar Program. “I cannot believe I’m older than he was when he died. … He missed so much—like me getting married. He never got to meet my children [daughter Harmon, 17, and son Caleb, 15]. But the influence he has had on me and my life, and the lives of my kids and my family, is immeasurable.”

She wrote the book, she says, mostly to process her grief. “But as I started on the journey, interviewing scores and scores of people that he grew up with and who worked with him, it became an incredible dive into his life and into things that I didn’t know. One thing that was so important to him was helping as much as he could, and mentoring people. I try to carry that forward—just making sure that I’m mentoring people and providing opportunities so that everybody has a seat at the table.”

Does she have thoughts about what her father would have said about the current state of the country?

“I’d like to say that certain things that have happened in the last 15 years wouldn’t have happened if Ron Brown were still here,” she says. “Mostly because of his ability to really bring folks together. He was someone who could sit down and break bread with complete strangers or negotiate wildly divergent views. … The skills that he had, and that he transferred onto me, are part of that: being able to communicate and interact with absolutely anyone.”