Born to be Wild: Alice Copeland Brown

In her adopted hometown of Canton, she is the fiery lady with the sweet Southern accent best known for taking to the streets in her Pilgrim outfit to protest the war in Iraq. She’s outspoken, some would call her brash, and she can be downright harsh with her criticism in the face of real or perceived injustices.

She is 73-year-old Alice Copeland Brown. And after more than six decades of speaking out and daring to be different, she remains as passionate and as energetic as ever before.

Just recently, in fact, Brown wore her trademark Pilgrim garb to the “St. Patrick’s Day Peace Parade” in South Boston, which followed the traditional St. Patrick’s Day parade route but was required by court order to remain at least one mile behind the main procession. Brown was one of about 200 who marched in the “alternate” parade, along with an assortment of anti-war, pro-labor and gay rights groups.

It was precisely the kind of atmosphere that Brown feels right at home in — and one that she wishes she could experience more often in her own backyard.

The truth is, while Brown is proud to be a member of this community and is grateful for the quality of public services that are provided here, she considers Canton, like a lot of New England towns, to be far too concerned with upholding the status quo.

“I think our town is the victim of low expectations,” said the always candid Brown in a recent telephone interview. “It’s such a conformist little town that anytime we do something [bold] that is for good, I want to scream and holler and rejoice because it is so unusual.”

One such instance occurred two years ago, when Canton High School students, along with various members of the community, turned out en masse to peacefully oppose a small contingent of Midwestern extremists who had come to protest the school’s production of The Laramie Project, a play about the 1998 murder of gay college student Matthew Shepard.

Brown said she was never more proud of Canton than at that moment. She remembers the scene vividly because she was also there, brandishing a sign that read, “Jesus loves me, Jesus loves you, and Jesus loves homos too.”

Of course, not everyone appreciates her unique brand of social activism, and Brown can accept that — as long as her critics, in turn, can accept her constitutional right to free expression.

It was the First Amendment, after all, that nourished her throughout her younger years in Birmingham, Alabama, where she and countless other brave men and women stood tall against the forces of bigotry and ignorance.

Born to a proud southern family in one of the most racially segregated corners of the country, Brown had been taught to believe, from a very early age, that whites were superior to blacks — and that middle and upper class whites, like herself, were better than their poor, “redneck” counterparts.

At the same time, she was steeped in the values and teachings of Christianity, a religion born of love and mercy and forgiveness. And while her great-great-granddad Simeon Copeland had never had any problems joining the two belief systems — a slave owner, Copeland had even authored a book defending slavery on biblical grounds — Brown simply could not stomach the ugliness of it all.

Finally, around the age of 11 or 12, it hit her. “Guess what?” she thought to herself at the time. “These people are nothing but a bunch of damn hypocrites.”

By the time she reached high school, Brown had become a full-fledged rebel, speaking out against segregation and urging her classmates to do the same. She even wrote a research paper on the topic — an examination of the moral, psychological and economic effects of segregation on white people — that earned her an “A double plus.”

“I had researched the heck out of that thing,” recalled Brown, who was president of her school’s honor society yet was “bullied constantly” and generally made to feel like an outcast.

Fortunately, the girls’ councilor at the school saw to it that Brown took “scholarship tests galore,” and it paid off with a four-year ride to Birmingham-Southern College, where she went on to receive an “excellent” liberal arts education.

Brown would later immerse herself in the Civil Rights movement of the early 1960s, joining the local Unitarian Church where she worked alongside freedom riders and various other activist groups in an effort to desegregate the city. She took part in a number of protests, including a sit-in at a lunch counter where she and the other protesters were refused service and eventually led out by police.

“You have to realize: All of this takes a lot of planning, months of planning,” Brown explained. “Because it was theatre; it was all street theatre.”

A young wife and mother at the time, Brown’s involvement in civil rights activities partly strained her relationship with her first husband, David Floyd, a Birmingham firefighter whose job it was to subdue the protesters — often with the use of a fire hose.

Even after the Civil Rights movement died down, Brown, who later became a software engineer, continued the good fight in both big and small ways. For instance, after deciding to leave Huntsville, Alabama, where she had lived for a number of years with her five children, she collaborated with a politically connected realtor to sell her home in an all-white neighborhood to an African American family. “It was our little way of integrating Huntsville,” reminisced Brown.

To this day, Brown has zero tolerance for bigotry of any kind. As she put it, “I’ve still got that teenager in me who wants to give the finger to people who act like fools, who act racist.”

Nowadays, she focuses most of her efforts on opposing the war as well as supporting the troops, inspired by her eldest son, Army Col. David Floyd, who has survived deployments to both Iraq and Afghanistan. She wears the Pilgrim outfit in honor of Joan Hurst Tilley, her 15^th grandmother who came to America on the Mayflower in 1620, leaving “home, hearth and children for the freedom of a strange land.”

A proud grandmother of Canton High School graduates, Brown sees a lot of good in this town and is critical, in part, because she cares. Having spent time on the Finance Committee, she remains actively engaged in town affairs and frequently shares her opinions in letters to the Citizen and other publications. She also devotes a lot of time and energy to the Democratic Party at the state and national levels, and she’s a fan of state Senator Brian Joyce, who she described as a “pretty decent representative.”

More than anything, Brown would like to see a little more passion on the part of the citizenry, and while admittedly impressed by the resolve shown by residents at the recent town meeting (See her recent letter to the editor), she sure does not want to witness another uncontested town election in her lifetime.

As for her own reputation, Brown learned long ago that she cannot please everyone, so she never tries to. Well-respected in some circles yet casually dismissed in others, she seems to take it all in stride — as she did a few years back while canvassing for the Democrats in a “conservative bedroom suburb of Boston.”

After striking out repeatedly in a neighborhood full of “stone fortresses” and “McMansions,” Brown posted the following on her blog Patriotic Pilgrim:

“In the midst of all this affluence … they yell at me from behind their massive double-doors. Or worse, peer at me from behind a curtain and shake their heads in mortal fear. Of what? A 68-year-old woman with a clipboard? Great terrorist cover, I’m sure.”

It was a classic Alice Brown rant, complete with insight, indignation, and a healthy dose of humor.

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Posted by Jay Turner on May 5 2011. Filed under Features. Both comments and pings are currently closed.