By Rick Steelhammer
Charleston Gazette-Mail
Editor’s note: This is the first in an occasional series for Black History Month 2026, remembering notable Black West Virginians.
For Anderson Hunt Brown, the road to success was an uphill grade filled with potholes.
Yet, the son of former slaves — armed with a fourth-grade education, a strong inner compass and an abundance of ambition — forged his way forward to build a real estate empire that provided wealth for his family as well as affordable housing and business opportunities for Charleston’s Black community.
And along the way, he used his money and influence to successfully challenge segregation laws and policies that denied Black residents equal access to, among other things, the Kanawha County Public Library and adequate health care.
“He was very much grounded in family, and in the community, in a very broad sense,” recalled his granddaughter, Andrea Taylor, retired senior diversity officer at Boston University and the former director of citizenship and public affairs for Microsoft. “He was particularly focused on helping African Americans in the Charleston area have equal and appropriate opportunities in housing, medical services and education.”
Born in Dunbar, the son of former slaves Brown was born on April 23, 1880, in a three-room house at the head of Dutch Hollow in Dunbar, near present-day Wine Cellar Park. Prior to emancipation in 1865, Brown’s parents, Henry and Margaret Brown, had been enslaved by a wholesale dry goods merchant in Charleston. Once freed, Henry Brown worked as a janitor in a Charleston saloon, and on a farm along the Kanawha River in Dunbar, while his wife took in laundry to help make ends meet.
While slavery had ended 15 years before he was born, Brown spent his childhood — and most of his adult life — in an era in which segregation was systemic and Jim Crow laws were in effect.
But his family, which included his parents, two sisters and four brothers, managed to move forward.
By the end of the 1800s, according to an interview with Brown recorded by his daughter, Della, shortly before his 1974 death, Brown’s father had built a small home in the Swann’s Hill section of Charleston and then moved into a larger home on Court Street. It was there that Anderson Brown launched what was likely his first venture as an entrepreneur: collecting coal spilled onto railroad tracks from hopper cars and delivering it, for a fee, to household coal bins.
Brown’s on-the-job work helped shape him
Following his father’s death in 1893, Brown dropped out of school to help provide for his family.
That event launched a period of diverse, on-the-job learning experiences that ranged from opening a meat market and restaurant in Charleston to being a musician with a theatrical troupe that toured the nation by rail.
After Anderson Brown’s brother, Ennis, taught him to play trombone, the two joined a band sponsored by Black businessman and community leader Samuel Starks. Starks — who helped found the first Knights of Pythias lodge in Charleston and went on to serve as state, then national leader of the fraternal organization — arranged for the band to play at Knights of Pythias lodges and political gatherings across West Virginia, Kentucky and Ohio.
As teenagers, Anderson Brown — along with brothers John and Charley — signed on as musicians with Al W. Martin’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin Company, which toured the U.S. and Canada by rail in the late 1890s and early 1900s. The troupe presented music-enhanced dramatic adaptations of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s 1852 anti-slavery novel, “Uncle Tom’s Cabin,” at cities along the way, with members of the cast and band living in three railroad cars while the troupe was on tour.
Brown later learned meat-cutting skills from brother John, who operated a meat market in Montgomery.
“I liked learning to cut and cook meat there,” he said in the 1973 interview with his daughter. “But I didn’t like the butchering part. I was chicken. I didn’t want to kill anything, especially the little lambs.”
A move into real estate
In the early 1900s, Brown opened a meat market and adjoining restaurant on Dryden Street in Charleston. With his savings from that venture, he bought a lot on Young Street on which, in about 1905, he built his first rental property. To pay for the house, Brown, with the help of a friend, took out a $3,200 loan from the Jackson County Building & Loan Co., since commercial lenders in Charleston were not issuing loans to African Americans at the time.
In 1907, Brown moved to Boston — where his sister and brother-in-law were living — working in and later becoming the manager of the stockroom of Manhattan Market, one of the largest groceries in New England, two years before returning to Charleston. There, in 1910, he married Nellie Lewis of Montgomery, a student at West Virginia Collegiate Institute, now West Virginia State University. The couple soon moved to Boston, where Brown took real estate courses and worked for a series of retailers, including an auto dealership, which he also came to manage, and played music with several bands, as well as the Victorian Orchestra.
Meanwhile, an older brother, Fred, had moved to Colorado and became an employee of that state’s governor, Julius Gunter.
With Gunter’s help, Fred Brown acquired a sizeable tract of grazing land in a Rocky Mountain valley southwest of Denver near the town of Malta. Fred Brown died in 1918, bequeathing the tract to AndersonBrown.
How Fred Brown came to work for the Colorado governor, and what his job was, is unclear, as is the value of the grazing land he owned.
But it was enough to help his brother get into the real estate business in a big way.
Anderson Brown traveled by train to Colorado, where he inspected the land, took title to the property and sold it.
He used the inheritance, plus money he had saved while working in Boston, to buy a home at 1219 Washington St. E., adjacent to the former Charleston High School. Then he began buying land and homes in Charleston and the Kanawha Valley to develop mainly into rental properties to serve the area’s underserved Black residents, launching a real estate dynasty that would eventually include nearly 100 properties.
“Brown’s early wading in the real estate pool was significant, as the 1920s was a difficult era, not only in terms of financial burdens, but also in terms of racial divide,” according to a profile on Brown that appeared on the website for the real estate marketing firm Realforce.
“The all-white National Association of Real Estate Boards started petitioning the courts to have the term ‘realtor’ be an exclusive trademark, so Black real estate professionals were not legally allowed to refer to themselves as ‘realtors,’” the profile continued.
“Black real estate entrepreneurs like Brown had little to no access to bank loans but were allowed to capitalize on niche markets — selling only to their own communities.”
Until the Fair Housing Act of 1968 was passed, racist policies and practices, such as redlining, in which home loans are withheld from neighborhoods with large numbers of racial minorities, were basically legal.
“It was against these odds that Anderson Hunt Brown used his wealth and strategic thinking to create high-quality housing” for his Black customers, according to the Realforce profile.
In the 1920s, Brown partnered with attorney C.E. Kimbreau to buy a large tract of land called the Harper Addition, adjacent to what is now West Virginia State University.
“We developed a subdivision there, sold quite a few lots,” Brown recalled in the 1973 interview with his daughter.
Brown and Kimbreau also sold a large part of the tract to the developers of Wertz Field, which opened in 1930 as the first commercial airport serving the Charleston area, and later became the site for a series of chemical plants.
Brown helped develop ‘The Block’
It was also in the 1920s that Brown partnered with Gurnett E. “Cap” Ferguson, a former teacher and World War I Army captain who had recently returned to civilian life in Charleston, in developing The Block, a major social and economic center and safe gathering space for the Black community.
Ferguson and Brown built the two buildings that would anchor The Block’s business district: The 72-room Ferguson Hotel and the adjacent Brown Building. In addition to providing lodging for Black visitors, the Ferguson Hotel, designed by John Norman, Charleston’s first African American architect, housed a restaurant, movie theater and beauty shop. The Brown Building contained a pharmacy, hot dog stand, dentist office, print shop, barber shop, pool hall, Brown’s real estate office, and office space for Black entrepreneurs.
The Block was bounded by Washington Street East and Shrewsbury, Lewis and Broad streets. Broad Street is now called Leon Sullivan Way.
“I had no trouble renting the office space,” Brown recalled in the 1973 interview. “The offices were well equipped, but if more items were needed, we helped them get them.”
At the Brown Building’s hot dog stand, “the events of the day were re-lived nightly” by younger members of Charleston’s Black community, according to the book “Black Past,” by James D. Randall and Anna Evans Gilmer. “Likewise, the older men would gather in Mr. Brown’s real estate office to do the same. Mr. Brown could be found in his office from early morning through late evening.”
“He was as very methodical person,” said Taylor, Brown’s granddaughter. “He followed the same schedule every day for dining, reading, sleeping and working. He had breakfast at the same time every day and then spent the rest of the day and into the evening in his office, where he would see people who needed housing, financial assistance or advice.”
Brown used his newly acquired wealth and influence to push back against injustices spawned by segregation.
“His goal was to improve opportunities for all people, and after losing two wives in childbirth, health care, which was segregated then and inadequate for African Americans, became one of his first targets,” Taylor said.
Later initiatives, and family accomplishments Brown’s first wife, Nellie, died in 1919, and his second wife and Taylor’s grandmother, Captolia Casey Brown, a teacher from Gallipolis, Ohio, died in 1924, three years after her marriage to Brown.
In the mid-1920s, Brown played a key role in opening the 30-bed Community Hospital at the corner of Shrewsbury and Lewis streets. It was the first Black hospital in Charleston with comparable technology to hospitals serving white people.
In 1928, the Charleston Independent School District assumed control of the Charleston Public Library and refused Black people’s access to the main library instead of using a smaller “colored” branch library at Garnet High School on Shrewsbury Street.
Brown and two other Black Charlestonians filed suit, charging that African Americans were being deprived of library services for which they had been taxed. Their suit carried the same title as a lawsuit decided by the U.S. Supreme Court 26 years later that led to the desegregation of public schools across the nation: Brown v. Board of Education.
Brown and the other two plaintiffs in the Charleston suit lost their case at the circuit court level, but appealed to the state Supreme Court, where they prevailed. Brown’s son, Willard L. Brown, one of his two children, was the lead lawyer for the West Virginia NAACP in the landmark U.S. Supreme Court case Brown v. Board of Education. Willard Brown and his sister, Della Brown Taylor Hardman, both earned undergraduate degrees at West Virginia State, then received postgraduate degrees at Boston University.
When the two Brown children were in Boston and housing for them was not available to them at the university, Anderson Brown bought two rental properties there to accommodate his children and other Black students while attending college. Della Hardman went on to teach art at WVSU for many years, and also became involved in the real estate business. Willard Brown represented his father in a 1955 lawsuit that led to the desegregation of Kanawha Airport’s Sky Chief Restaurant.
Both children, along with their father, were among occupants of a new Brown Building that was completed in 1971, after the old building was sold to a hotel developer.
At the age of 84, Brown traveled to Ghana, “in search of family connections and to get in touch with his roots,” Taylor said. “It was quite a remarkable journey for him.”
When Taylor retraced her grandfather’s path to Ghana in the late 1990s, “I went to a church in Accra which he had visited, and they still remembered him.”
Brown died in 1974 and the age of 94.
“Given the environment in which he was born, he played the hand that was dealt him, and channeled his intellectual horsepower into an entrepreneurial platform that allowed him to provide for his children and his community,” said Brown’s great-grandson, Wole Coaxum. Coaxum is the former head of sales at JPMorgan Chase, and founder of Mobility Capital Finance, or MoCaFi, a startup that provides access to the financially underserved.
“He had a generosity of spirit and a willingness to make whatever sacrifices were needed to benefit his family and his community,” Taylor said. “He believed the entire community should have the tools it needed for everyone to move forward.
Rick Steelhammer is a features reporter. He can be reached at 304-348-5169 or rsteelhammer@hdmediallc.com. Follow @ rsteelhammer on X.
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