Linda Brown
Think what it would be like if you couldn’t read or couldn’t read above fourth grade level. So much of what you take for granted would be closed to you. “For me,” Linda says, “reading has always been so important that I think the worst deprivation I can imagine would be not being able to read.”
Linda Brown grew up in Levittown, Long Island and Cape Vincent, a small New York State community near the Canadian border.
Immediately after college, she volunteered for the Peace Corps and was sent to Uganda for two years to teach English. Peace Corp volunteers at that time were mostly inexperienced idealists. “Teachers were lucky. They were often more successful than community workers because they could work within the existing structure. It was hard to be effective as a community worker because you had to build everything from scratch.”
“I think I got more out of it than the students. In fact, after that, I decided that if you want to change the world, you should stay in the United States. It’s a harder job than you think.”
Her first inkling of what would later motivate her, she says, came when she was watching a documentary, narrated by Edward R. Murrow, on farm workers and being struck by the poverty and terrible working conditions.
Linda has spent most of her adult life as a literacy instructor. One of her earliest jobs, after the two years she spent in Uganda, was teaching reading to people at the Bronx House of Detention Center, a place where people are sent before they go to trial.
“A large percentage of people who end up in the criminal justice system can’t read above fourth grade level,” Linda noted. “I knew that being able to read was important so I went to the Department of Corrections and explained what I wanted to do. I was sent to the recreation director who agreed to allow me to create literacy and GED (general educational development) classes. I had to develop the curriculum and pay for supplies out of my own salary.”
“The biggest problem in teaching teenagers and adults to read is getting them to form new habits. Once you get past that, which can take a great deal of time and patience, you can make a difference,” Linda explained.
Linda worked for many different literacy programs, from those run by the United Farm Workers Union and the New York City Technical College in Brooklyn to classes organized by CUNY all over the city. Some of her students, often from Caribbean countries, were studying to get their High School Equivalency Certificate so they could move from up from a menial job to one with better pay and status. They were very highly motivated and gave her an appreciation of the immigrant struggle and also their contribution to the city.
Now that she’s retired, what does a person like her, living in Park Slope, do? Luckily for her, and for the rest of us, she lived opposite Joyce Jed, president of Good Neighbors, who in 2014 recruited her (and many others) to work on the creation of what is now Good Neighbors of Park Slope.
“I was lucky to be in on the beginning of this marvelous organization,” she says, “and I never stop being surprised at how involved I still am. Of course, the people who live in Park Slope live in a kind of wonderful bubble. Long may it stay inflated.”