Fredi Brown, who helped bring Black history museum to Bradenton, has died at 97
Fredi Sears Brown, who, along with her late husband Ernest Leroy Brown Jr., helped preserve a museum’s worth of Black history, died March 9, 2021. She was 97.
The Browns had been collecting documents and artifacts relating to the African-American experience for years in Detroit, before retiring to Bradenton in 1974. In 1990, the couple began displaying their collection in a small trailer donated by the local Head Start program.
That was the beginning of the Family Heritage House Museum, which eventually was housed in a 2,085-square-foot wing of the Manatee Community College Library.
In 2018, the museum moved to the new Library and Learning Center on the campus of State College of Florida, Manatee-Sarasota.
“It started off with just a little seed,” their daughter, Beverly Brown Nash, said Monday of the genesis of the museum. “A lot of it was connected to my father’s work and his travels with the Michigan Consolidated Gas Company and the Detroit Urban League.”
Fredi Sears Brown was born Dec. 4, 1923, in Bradenton and died in Tamarac, where she had moved to be near her daughter.
She grew up attending St. Mary Missionary Baptist Church. In 1939, after graduating as valedictorian from her Lincoln High School senior class, she enrolled at Florida A&M College (later University) in Tallahassee.
After graduating from Florida A & M in 1944, she went to work for a black-owned newspaper in Kansas City, Mo., writing advertising copy for the Kansas City Call. There she met a young reporter, Ernest Leroy Brown, Jr.
They moved to Detroit and married in 1946, raising a family of three sons and one daughter. For the next three decades, her job was taking care of her home and family but she also offered her services to Detroit’s under-served black neighborhoods.
She worked with the GED program, counseled teen substance abusers, taught English to incarcerated women and established a library in a housing development community center.
During the 1960s as African Americans fought for their civil rights, Fredi and Ernest began collecting black memorabilia to capture the moment.
After the couple moved to Bradenton in 1974, Mrs. Brown landed a full-time job at Manatee Community College as a recruiter and equal access/equal opportunity coordinator. She also earned a master of science in education in 1981 from the University of South Florida, Sarasota-Manatee.
Fredi continued her support of the museum until failing health forced her to step down.
In 2010, she was honored with the President’s Call to Service Award at MCC (now State College of Florida) for dedicating more than 4,000 hours of volunteer service in her lifetime. The then-86-year-old had racked up nearly 11,000 hours in the previous decade.
“I’m not doing it for honors,” Fredi said at the time. “I’m doing it because it’s something that I’ve been led to do. “
The Family Heritage House Museum remains a legacy to her life of service.
In addition to her husband, she was preceded in death by her youngest son Peter. She is survived by sons Ernest (Lynn) and Kevin (Kay) and daughter Beverly (David). Services were March 13 at St. Mary Missionary Baptist Church and at Skyway Memorial Gardens.
Westside Funeral Home was in charge of arrangements.
