LIVE: Sylvia Brown Highlights Family’s Philanthropy in New Book, “Grappling with Legacy”

LIVE: Sylvia Brown Highlights Family’s Philanthropy in New Book, “Grappling with Legacy”

It was hearing the words “there are no good Browns” 13 years ago by a speaker at an inaugural event for the Steering Committee on Slavery and Justice that inspired Sylvia Brown to write a book on her famous family, whom she had always admired for their public service and philanthropy. 

The eldest of the 11th generation of the Brown family of Rhode Island, Brown began a 12-year-long process of researching her family’s archives, the largest business archive in the country, as the basis for her new book “Grappling with Legacy."

In the book she focuses on Nicholas Brown II (1769-1841), who Brown University is named after, and admits that she was “surprised the university never commissioned a biography of it’s namesake” she says “he was the first [Brown] to be truly altruistic and view the University as an agency of social change.” 

In her research of her family history, she states, “there is a common thread of public service and wanting to make the world a better place, which recurs from one generation to the next” and that it must be her own “legacy” to continue to carry that out.