It was 2002 when Brownn put it all together. She was attending a women's health conference at UC San Francisco when a chart flashed on the big screen. "Life expectancy," it read, and the bar for African Americans was much shorter than for every other ethnicity. Frighteningly shorter.
Brownn started thinking of all the people she knew who had died prematurely. Her co-worker, who died of lung cancer in her 50s. Her foster brother, who was 8 when he succumbed after a straightforward operation to correct a "lazy eye." Her beloved father, who died at 60 of bladder cancer. She heard her mother's voice questioning the care those loved ones had received from a white medical establishment.
Growing up in South Los Angeles, Brownn remembered finding a lump in her breast when she was 14, two months after her father's death, and waiting a year before telling anyone "because I was afraid to go to the doctor." She finally confided in her worried mother, but it took them another year to muster the trust to pursue medical treatment. The lump was benign.
And she thought about her first real job, as an outreach worker in the Hypertension Control Project in Watts. Brownn spent her days contacting African Americans who had been diagnosed with high blood pressure to make sure they were taking their medication and seeing the doctor for follow-up care.
Most weren't.
"They didn't trust the doctor," she said. "They knew they were sick. They didn't want to take the pills. They thought they were being experimented on. That's what resonates with me. I heard this over and over and over again."
Brownn has focused her career as a community advocate on healthcare issues. But that "aha!" moment at UCSF made her realize that she needed to do more -- because that bar chart "meant lives lost."
As she likes to point out, "The numbers speak for themselves."
Life expectancy for black women is 75 years, according to "Death in the Golden State," a 2007 report by the Public Policy Institute of California. For white women, it's 80 years, Latinas, 83 and Asians, 85.
So a few months after returning home from San Francisco, Brownn launched Life-Long: Sisters Staying Healthy with a small conference on black women's health. It has since become an annual event. Last November's conference, funded by public and private grants, brought together healthcare professionals, educators and 120 women.
