Robert S. Browne devoted his life to improving conditions for less fortunate people and fostering economic opportunities for African-Americans.
Growing up on the South Side in the 1920s and ’30s, Mr. Browne had known relative prosperity. He came from Woodlawn, which was then a thriving stronghold of Chicago’s black middle-class, relatives said.
From an early age, he knew what he wanted to do, his half-sister recalled.
“He told his mother that he wanted to help people,” said Wendelle Browne. “He was generous as a kid, always giving to others and giving his time, offering to help you.”
Mr. Browne, 79, an economist, former diplomat, foreign policy adviser, activist, writer, critic of the Vietnam War and founder of several non-profit groups, died of heart failure Thursday, Aug. 5, at Helen Hayes Hospital in Rockland County, N.Y.
As a child, Mr. Browne was better off than most black children but experienced his share of suffering.
His father, William, who worked for the city’s Water Department and moonlighted as a pianist, died when Mr. Browne was a teenager. His older brother, William, became a chemist but died of a brain tumor in his early 40s.
Mr. Browne attended James McCosh School, an elementary and middle school in Woodlawn, and Englewood High School.
He received a bachelor’s degree in economics from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 1944. Soon after, he was drafted into the Army. Although he disliked the military, Mr. Browne credited the GI Bill of Rights with opening the way for him to attend the University of Chicago’s Graduate School of Business, where he received an MBA in 1947. Mr. Browne continued his training at the London School of Economics and Political Science and the City University of New York.
A turning point in Mr. Browne’s life came in the 1950s and ’60s, when he began a long personal association with Indochina, which led to his opposition to the war in Vietnam. Lately, he had expressed similar feelings about the war in Iraq, said his daughter Mai.
From 1955 to 1958, and from 1958 to 1961, Mr. Browne was stationed, respectively, in Cambodia and Vietnam as an official with the U.S. Agency for International Development. It was there that he met his wife, Huoi Nguyen, a Vietnamese working in Cambodia.
Mr. Browne became an anti-war activist. In 1966, he ran as an Independent for a U.S. Senate seat in New Jersey. He also returned to Vietnam as a peacemaker.
“His strong feelings about the Vietnam War were stimulated because he knew that innocent people in Vietnam were being caught in the middle,” said Jewel Cobb, a childhood friend.
Mr. Browne established several organizations between 1969 and 1971: the Black Economic Research Center, a center promoting applied research in economics by African-Americans for African-American development projects; the Emergency Land Fund, a group aiming to reverse the decline of black land ownership in the South; and the Twenty-FirstCentury Foundation, which provides grants for African-American-driven initiatives.
“He had an awareness of the importance of black folks in American society,” Cobb said. “He felt strongly that black people needed to be supported.”
Other survivors include three other children, Hoa, Alexi and Marshall; and a grandson. A memorial service will be held in New York at a date in September yet to be determined.
