As the height of his half-hour pep talk, he plucked a dazed 59-year-old Mary Robinson out of the audience and persuaded evacuees to raise her up into the air.
"When we work together and believe we were born to greatness, we will start rising a little higher," Brown shouted as evacuees lifted Robinson above their heads. "I want you to show President George Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney, Gov. Sonny Perdue, Mayor Shirley Franklin just how high Katrina overcomers can go."
More than 80,000 Katrina evacuees live in metropolitan Atlanta. Many have assimilated more successfully here than have evacuees in Houston and San Antonio, according to a recent national study by the Appleseed Foundation, a nonprofit social advocacy group.
Evacuees in Atlanta have been particularly successful, the report said, because many of them "self-evacuated" as they already had friends or family in the city.
Atlanta also attracted some Katrina evacuees because of its reputation as a progressive black city.
A large number of evacuees settled in DeKalb County, the second-most affluent predominantly African American county in the nation.
In 2005, Black Enterprise magazine ranked Atlanta the "Best City for African Americans to Live, Work and Play," based on entrepreneurial opportunities, earnings potential, business, housing and education.
But many Katrina evacuees -- particularly older people -- are struggling.
"I look at the city and I think when I was younger I would have been all over the place, but at this stage in my life my energy level has disappeared," said Robinson, the woman given a lift at the rally.
She ran a hair salon in east New Orleans for 25 years, but said she didn't feel motivated to open a new one here.
After finding work in October, Robinson was laid off in January and said she had gone into "panic mode."
In recent job interviews, she has found herself breaking out in sweats, too agitated to write, and crying.
"I thought I was OK, but this stuff has affected me more than I realized," she said.
Tyrone Paramore, an outreach worker for Project Hope, which offers crisis counseling to Katrina evacuees, said he was starting to see more and more mental health problems, particularly as the first anniversary of Hurricane Katrina approached.
"A lot of these survivors are saying they didn't have mental health issues before," he said.
At the end of the day, clusters of Katrina evacuees stood outside the headquarters waiting for buses in the hot sun.
Emma Johnson, 59, smiled dreamily as she waited for a bus to take her to the train station. "It was a nice day," she said. "It helped lift my spirits."
Still, Johnson, who used to work for New Orleans' Department of Safety and Permits and has struggled to find a job in Atlanta, said she had hoped more employers would be at the event.
"I guess once I start working, I'll think of Atlanta as a land of opportunity," she said.
