Black History Month: Lorain's Charlesetta Brown offers legacy of family, faith

LORAIN — Gospel music drifted over the radio and lunch simmered on the stove while Charlesetta Brown sat in her warm, wood-paneled living room. Her Reid Avenue home is full of pictures — portraits of five generations of Brown's family dot its walls, having passed through its doors, held barbecues in its backyard or sleepovers across its floors. And Brown wouldn't have it any other way. "It ain't where you live, it's how you live," she said, noting her legacy is her family, friends and neighbors and an effort to take care of one another. Family and faith are cornerstones for Brown — shown in her missionary work and a beaming smile in photos with her grandchildren and great-grandchildren. Brown, 79, has served on numerous boards and organizations and won high honors over the years for her work in Lorain — from the NAACP's Living History Award in 2005 to the National Association of Negro Business and Professional Women's Clubs' Sojourner Truth award in 2017. No matter the position she's held in the NAACP, Lorain Port Authority, National Council of Negro Women or other organizations, politics have been an undercurrent — there hasn't been a mayor in Lorain she hasn't worked with, she said, no matter their political party. "You find out that people are all the same, we've just got different colors on our skin and that was designed by the good Lord," she said. It's a game of numbers, she said of her interest in politics, as a news report chattered in the background. Brown has met and worked with everyone from City Council members to congressional leaders and is the Lorain Precinct 2-D Democratic committee chairperson and Lorain City Democratic Party secretary. Her political involvement began when she was in high school in Memphis, Tennessee. Growing up on Beale Street in the '50s, she remembered attending Booker T. Washington High School and bringing reports in on local politicians for credit in history class. Memphis was highly segregated at the time, but she remembered nearby Handy Park full of all nationalities, no one fighting, no one hurting one another. By her sophomore year of high school, she was registering people to vote and going to polling and precinct locations after working with a teacher at the YWCA. "She would take me up to the Board of Elections with her, take me to the polling and precinct places. … They taught us how to do it," she said. She remembered during a career day in high school asking a police officer questions. The man said she was smart and asked where she lived, but when she gave him her address he told her she lived on the "wrong side of the tracks." "I told my grandmother and she said, 'You're never on the wrong side of the track.' She said, 'Baby, it ain't where you live, it's how you live. … People think just because you're at this side of town or that side of town or in this project that you're different. And you're no different.'" She credits that advice from her grandmother, Lila Poole, for carrying her far — from a tiny house on Beale Street to a home in Lorain large enough that there are rooms she doesn't even go inside. When her father took a job with Ford in Lorain, she'd spend summers in the International City and the rest of the year in Memphis. After high school, she moved to New Jersey with her husband at the time, before coming back to Lorain in 1968. "If you can make it in Lorain, I think you can just make it about anywhere," she said. She and her family lived on West 12th Street, West 14th, West 15th and West 16th Street before finally settling on Reid Avenue. In the 1970s, she helped start the Neighborhood Block Watch program there and ultimately ended up raising her four children, Angela, James, Ryan and Joseph, on her own after her divorce, in the Reid Avenue home. "My husband was in (my children's lives), but he wasn't in my life. I had a goal and a plan and I was going to do and thank God I was able to continue to do what I was going to do," she said. She worked for the city and county before becoming a career counselor — all the while staying active in her volunteer work with her church, God's Believers in Christ under the Rev. James Williams. In the mid-2000s, she said Williams told her she'd been called to be a missionary. After quipping that the Lord should've told her first, she started a group of volunteer missionaries and eventually attended a conference in Birmingham, Alabama. "I went to Alabama, and I tell everybody I got on the plane, I went up in the air, I went down to Alabama, I came back a different (person)," she said. "I saw so much love for people, I saw people of all different colors … those women just gave me so much love." People can't live without one another, she said. And she still runs into those she helped get jobs through Lorain County Community College, or who were lent a helping hand through the church. As she gets ready for her 80th birthday this spring, Brown has no real plans to slow down. She's gone from raising grandchildren to looking after great-grandchildren and trying to keep her adopted city in line — from its politicians to its parishioners. "You have to want things to be better," she said. Later she said, "I don't think I've done very much, but I think I've accomplished a lot because I think I've touched a lot of people … because I tried to help them." Contact Carissa Woytach at (440) 329-7245 or cwoytach@chroniclet.com.