Hall of Fame NFL athlete, actor and civil right activist Jim Brown has died. He was 87. According to TMZ, Brown's wife Monique Brown announced the news on Instagram, saying, “It is with profound sadness that I announce the passing of my husband, Jim Brown. He passed away peacefully last night at our L.A. home. To the world he was an activist, actor and football star.”
She continued, “To our family, he was a loving and wonderful husband, father and grandfather. Our hearts are broken.”
The Cleveland Browns owners Dee and Jimmy Haslam said in a statement, “Jim Brown is a true icon of not just the Cleveland Browns but the entire NFL. He was certainly the greatest to ever put on a Browns uniform and arguably one of the greatest players in NFL history. Jim was one of the reasons the Browns have such a tremendous fan base today.”
According to The New York Times, Brown played for The Cleveland Browns from 1957 to 1965 after earning All American honors at Syracuse University in football and lacrosse, Brown helped take Cleveland to the 1964 National Football League championship.
Brown never missed a game, piercing defensive lines in 118 consecutive regular-season games, though he played one year with a broken toe and another with a sprained wrist.
Brown was voted football’s greatest player of the 20th century by a six-member panel of experts assembled by The Associated Press in 1999. A panel of 85 experts selected by NFL Films in 2010 placed him number two all time behind the wide receiver Jerry Rice of the San Francisco 49ers.
He was inducted into the Pro Football Hall of Fame in 1971, the Lacrosse Hall of Fame in 1984 and the College Football Hall of Fame in 1995.
Brown retired in 1966 to pursue an acting career. He appeared in the 1964 western “Rio Conchos” and was involved in the shooting of the World War II film “The Dirty Dozen” in England.
Brown was also very vocal during the civil rights movement. He founded the Negro Industrial and Economic Union — later known as the Black Economic Union, as a vehicle to create jobs. It facilitated loans to Black businessmen in poor areas — what he called Green Power — reflecting his long-held belief that economic self-sufficiency held more promise than mass protests.
In June 1967, Brown invited other leading Black athletes, most notably Bill Russell and Lew Alcindor — the future Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, to the office of his Economic Union to hear Muhammad Ali after Ali had been stripped of his heavyweight boxing title and faced imprisonment for refusing to be drafted in protest over the Vietnam War.
In the 1980s, Brown founded the Amer-I-Can Foundation to teach basic life skills to gang members and prisoners, mainly in California, and steer them away from violence. The foundation expanded nationally and remains active.