‘He just did his work.’ Late Tacoma pastor strove to give former inmates a second chance
It was always a difficult job, and often a publicly thankless one.
For decades, the Rev. Leo C. Brown — who died on Jan. 19 at his home in Tacoma at the age of 78 — was one of the most prominent Black pastors in Tacoma.
He also was the last man many people wanted to show up in their neighborhood.
It wasn’t that the community harbored ill will toward Brown; in fact, even those whom he publicly sparred with, like former Steilacoom mayor Ron Lucas, tended to hold “the good reverend” in the highest regard.
Rather, it was the rehabilitative endeavor that Brown’s faith led him towards: providing second chances to those exiting prison.
In the early 1970s, Brown — who would go on to found True Vine Community Church of God in Christ, a predominantly black Pentecostal church in the city’s North End — opened the first incarnation of Progress House, which has now provided work-release opportunities to more than 13,000 former inmates. Brown welcomed his first 16 residents to a brick parsonage next to Tacoma’s Emmanuel Temple Church of God in Christ, where he served as an associate pastor to the Rev. R.E. Altheimer at the time.
Today, in addition to its Tacoma location, Progress House operates work-release facilities in Seattle and Portland, serving approximately 600 men and women each year. Brown also opened the True Vine Senior Citizen Apartments, which include 23 apartments funded by HUD for elderly low-income tenants, and co-founded a summer camp for underprivileged children.
When it came to his work-release facilities, nearly every step of the way Brown’s efforts were jeered by those who had no interest in seeing a halfway house open near their home, according to The News Tribune archives.
“Anywhere you try to move us, the neighborhood is going to say, ‘Not in my neighborhood,’” Brown told TNT reporter Sean Robinson in 2006.
The conflict was simply a reality of the job, and one Brown humbly accepted, according to his daughter Cynthia Fedrick, who now serves as chief operating officer of the Progress House Association.
“He wanted to focus on people who he felt were overlooked,” Fedrick said. “If you’ve had a criminal background, it was hard for you to get a job, and hard for you to get a place to stay. But he saw all of that as part of his overall ministry, to help people get a second chance.”
Originally drawn to Tacoma after the Army stationed him at Fort Lewis as a young man, he became a father and stepfather to 14 children, a grandfather and great grandfather many times over.
According to those who knew him best, Brown’s passing provides an opportunity to reflect on his life’s work and pay tribute one more time.
While Brown was honored many times — including Washington Gov. John Spellman, Pierce County Executive Booth Gardner and Tacoma Mayor Doug Sutherland all declaring Feb. 6, 1982 as “Rev. Leo C. Brown Jr. Day” — Brown never truly got the credit he deserved, according Bobbie Richardson, a longtime friend.
That’s one reason why Tacoma Mayor Victoria Woodards said she planned to issue a new proclamation declaring Saturday Rev. Leo C. Brown Jr. Day, precisely 39 years after he first received the honor.
Richardson, 72, first met Brown while she was working as a secretary for the federal Model Cities program. She recalled Brown showing up in hopes of speaking with the program’s director about potentially funding Progress House.
The director, Richardson still remembers, desperately wanted to dodge the persistent reverend, instructing her to tell Brown that he was out of the office.
Brown “knew I was lying,” Richardson acknowledged this week, but proceeded to do little more than graciously pat her on the hand, she said.
Eventually, the Model Cities program would fund Progress House, serving as just one example of how the charismatic and humble Brown had a knack for winning over skeptics while getting what he needed to continue, Richardson said.
“I just feel like, ‘This is an unsung hero,’” Richardson said. “He looked at people as a child of God and was a lover of people.”
According to the Rev. Gregory Christopher, the pastor at Shiloh Baptist Church on Hilltop and the former president of the NAACP, Tacoma branch, Brown’s passion for Progress House was inextricable from his faith and his upbringing.
As former News Tribune reporter Rob Carson profiled in 2005, the founder of True Vine was “raised in a broken home in Washington, D.C., by a mother who scrubbed floors in the Capitol to keep her four children fed and clothed.” In addition to his work at the church he built from the ground up, Christoper noted, Brown went on to become a long leader of the Tacoma Ministerial Alliance as well as the Bishop of the Washington State Jurisdiction of the Church of God in Christ.
“He was right there with (The Rev. Joseph A. Boles),” Christopher said, putting Brown in the company of the pioneering Tacoma civil rights leader who spent nearly five decades as pastor of St. John Baptist Church and died in 2013.
As a young associate pastor under Altheimer, Brown’s first interaction with the incarcerated came in the late 1960s, when he conducted prison ministries at McNeil Island. Soon, he decided he could do more good for the men he encountered behind bars by helping to provide them support on the outside, he often recalled.
Though Progress House has always welcomed former prisoners of all races, and later expanded to providing work-release opportunities to women, Woodards said that Brown’s impact has been keenly felt by Black men, who have historically been disproportionately incarcerated.
“It was important to him to be able to help these predominantly men, and predominantly men of color,” Woodards said.
When asked why, Woodards said that’s just who Brown was.
“People need second chances. People need a place to come where people believe in them, and can support them, and can let them know that ... one mistake doesn’t define their whole life,” Woodards said.
“He wasn’t the type of person who thought a lot about credit or accolades,” the mayor continued.
“He just did his work, on behalf of this community.”
This story was originally published February 6, 2021 at 5:05 AM.
