“My dad was easily the greatest human being I’ve ever known because of his tremendous compassion for people, especially the underdogs. This influenced every aspect of my life,” says Brown, who is a partner in Greenbaum Rowe Smith & Davis’ legal department and chair of the White Collar Defense & Corporate and International Human Rights Compliance Group.

Brown was raised in what he calls a “Jim Crow housing project,” the Booker T. Washington complex. After a childhood watching his father organize protest marches and fight David vs. Goliath legal battles, he wanted to be anything but a lawyer.

He attended Columbia University, where the late 1960s student protests were getting under way, and he became an activist in the Black student movement. As a result of charges stemming from a confrontation between police officers and protesters, Brown “became the football in an important legal battle.” He wasn’t convicted and was never indicted, and the legal experience made him decide to become an attorney. “I realized that lawyers are the core who can challenge the legal system,” he recalls.

Diversity and Inclusion: Working Within the Law for Change

He went to law school at the University of California, Berkeley, where activism and legal knowledge went hand in hand. As he launched his legal career, the people he’d met through his father globally made him want to explore human-rights ramifications in and outside of the United States.

“It’s hard to be around a person like my father and not realize how important this is,” he says. “I grew up in the movement. I met my first aboriginal people who came to the U.S. in 1956 … I saw the Ghandists around Dr. King and the strategic value of non-violence. There’s always been an aspect of the civil-rights movement that had an eye toward all people who were oppressed.”

Read: What Dr. King Really Meant: The Obligation That Benefits Everyone

This “natural progression, intellectually and personally,” led him to an astounding career, domestically and globally. In the United States, where he’s specialized in white-collar crimes and corporate compliance, he’s appeared in high-profile trials, including the trial of former Labor Secretary Raymond J. Donovan and the successful eight-year defense of senior executives of a large corporation charged with environmental violations. Globally, he’s conducted investigations in Kenya, East Africa, El Salvador, the Cayman Islands, Switzerland, the Bahamas, Colombia and Sierra Leone.

What jump-started his work for human rights was being asked to be an anchor on Court TV, reporting on war-crime violations. He has continued his legal/journalism career, hosting the Emmy Award–winning New Jersey Network Program “Due Process” and often serving as a legal analyst for broadcast programs. He has also taught international criminal law at Seton Hall University, has been a prolific public speaker and has received numerous awards, including the Award of Excellence from the Thurgood Marshall College Fund, the Distinguished International Award from the National Council of Women in the USA and the Van Y. Clinton Award for “excellence as a tireless advocate for just causes” from the Garden State Bar Association.

His trial experience has included criminal cases, serious violations of international humanitarian law, RICO violations, environmental pollution and internal investigations for public and corporate clients.

Crimes Against Women

Brown and his wife, Wanda, who is also an attorney, operate the International Justice Project, which fights human-rights abuses. “We focus on crimes against women. If you sexually assault women, you demoralize them and destroy the family union,” he says. “Women are the key to economic life. The deliberate attempt to destroy women is a big part of how the law looks in many countries.”

As a result of these experiences, Brown has pioneered the development of a new practice area, working with corporations to make them aware of the risk-assessment and business benefits of their involvement with human-rights causes.

“A C-level person says, ‘Wait a minute. Think of the short-, mid- and long-term requirements of regulations and how we’re perceived at a time when businesses are required to act as sovereign entities.’ There is a profound transformation now culminating in a way that affects businesses,” he says, and their efforts toward diversity and inclusion.

Read: Women’s History Month Facts and Why Is Global Diversity So Difficult?

The post Why This Attorney Makes Global Human Rights His Personal Challenge appeared first on DiversityInc.

Brown will speak about human rights, values and the implication on global business at DiversityInc’s April 24–25 event. His values and priorities were set early on by his father, Raymond A. Brown, a noted criminal attorney and civil-rights activist who defended Rubin “Hurricane” Carter and Joanne Chesimard.

“My dad was easily the greatest human being I’ve ever known because of his tremendous compassion for people, especially the underdogs. This influenced every aspect of my life,” says Brown, who is a partner in Greenbaum Rowe Smith & Davis’ legal department and chair of the White Collar Defense & Corporate and International Human Rights Compliance Group. Read more about Brown’s viewpoint on human rights and his father’s influence in Taking Risks for Your Brothers: The Power of Dr. King’s Words.

Brown was raised in what he calls a “Jim Crow housing project,” the Booker T. Washington complex. After a childhood watching his father organize protest marches and fight David vs. Goliath legal battles, he wanted to be anything but a lawyer.

He attended Columbia University, where the late 1960s student protests were getting under way, and he became an activist in the Black student movement. As a result of charges stemming from a confrontation between police officers and protesters, Brown “became the football in an important legal battle.” He wasn’t convicted and was never indicted, and the legal experience made him decide to become an attorney. “I realized that lawyers are the core who can challenge the legal system,” he says.

Working Within the Law for Change

He went to law school at the University of California, Berkeley, where activism and the legal knowledge went hand in hand. As he launched his legal career, the people he’d met through his father globally made him want to explore human-rights ramifications in and outside of the United States.

“It’s hard to be around a person like my father and not realize how important this is,” he says. “I grew up in the movement. I met my first aboriginal people who came to the U.S. in 1956 … I saw the Ghandists around Dr. King and the strategic value of non-violence. There’s always been an aspect of the civil-rights movement that had an eye toward all people who were oppressed.”

This “natural progression, intellectually and personally,” led him to an astounding career, domestically and globally. In the United States, where he’s specialized in white-collar crimes and corporate compliance, he’s appeared in high-profile trials, including the trial of former Labor Secretary Raymond J. Donovan and the successful eight-year defense of senior executives of a large corporation charged with environmental violations. Globally, he’s conducted investigations in Kenya, East Africa, El Salvador, the Cayman Islands, Switzerland, the Bahamas, Colombia and Sierra Leone.

What jump-started his work for human rights was being asked to be an anchor on Court TV, reporting on war-crime violations. He’s continued his legal/journalism career, hosting the Emmy Award–winning New Jersey Network Program “Due Process” and often serving as a legal analyst for broadcast programs. He has also taught international criminal law at Seton Hall University, has been a prolific public speaker and has received numerous awards, including the Award of Excellence from the Thurgood Marshall College Fund, the Distinguished International Award from the National Council of Women in the USA and the Van Y. Clinton Award for “excellence as a tireless advocate for just causes” from the Garden State Bar Association.

His trial experience has included criminal cases, serious violations of international humanitarian law, RICO violations, environmental pollution and internal investigations for public and corporate clients.

Crimes Against Women 

Brown and his wife, Wanda, who is also an attorney, operate the International Justice Project, which fights human-rights abuses. “We focus on crimes against women. If you sexually assault women, you demoralize them and destroy the family union,” he says. “Women are the key to economic life. The deliberate attempt to destroy women is a big part of how the law looks in many countries.”

As a result of these experiences, Brown has pioneered the development of a new practice area working with corporations to make them aware of the risk-assessment and business benefits of their involvement with human-rights causes.

“A C-level person says, ‘Wait a minute. Think of the short-, mid- and long-term requirements of regulations and how we’re perceived at a time when businesses are required to act as sovereign entities.’ There is a profound transformation now culminating in a way that affects businesses,” he says.

For best practices on global diversity, read Best Practices to Overcome Global Diversity Challenges.

The post From Civil Rights to Global Human Rights appeared first on DiversityInc.

Brown works in the litigation department at Greenbaum, Rowe, Smith and Davis and is chair of its White Collar Defense & Corporate Compliance Practice Group. He is an expert on global human rights. Brown will speak at DiversityInc’s April 24–25 diversity conference, Managing the Global War for Talent.           

It was the first time a secular speech gave me chills. The details of the precise Manhattan venue and my age (13 to 15) have faded. I do, however, recall the context.

I was a child of what we called the “movement.” My dad had taken me to hear Dr. King speak in the context of the struggle with the conservative leadership of the NAACP. (Although my dad was president of Jersey City NAACP, he was not on their side in this fight. In fact, when a national news magazine asked him on the eve of the 1963 March on Washington if he thought NAACP Executive Director Roy Wilkins was asleep at the switch, he had replied, “Hell, Roy doesn’t even know where the switch is.”)

I don’t recall every minute of King’s speech except the talismanic words and phrases … “justice … freedom … the redemptive power of unmerited suffering”—and the chills. I did know that this was an argument over direct action and protest in the movement, an argument on which King prevailed.

For more on the power of words as tools to combat hateful speech, read “NBA Star John Amaechi: Hate Speech Goes Beyond N- and F-Words.” For more on dispelling stereotypes, read “‘Blacks Should Not Be Satisfied With Food Stamps’: The Danger of Stereotypes.”

Years later, however, I trailed silently behind my dad the night before the march when the “old heads,” led by the eminence grise and father of the march, A. Phillip Randolph, prevailed upon John Lewis and others not to denounce King as irrelevant and the march itself as “too little too late.” Since that August, my stomach has turned as the forces of reaction and revision have used the phrase “content of their character” to convert King into a prophet of post-racialism.

But it’s not a parlor game to say that King believed in “human rights.” He was championing the subject just 20 years after the concept was born and long before it gained its current traction. Much of the conversation about his “Mountaintop” speech at Mason Temple the night before his assassination has missed this point and mistakenly emphasized his Mosaic premonition of death.

King used the Mason Temple moment to defend himself against those who charged him with sullying the banner of civil rights by defending underpaid garbage workers in Memphis. His response was that he was living in a time of the “Human Rights Revolution” and he would support people from Johannesburg to Memphis who were “rising” to demand freedom and justice.

His text that night was the parable of the Good Samaritan. He argued that the road from Jerusalem to Jericho was “really conducive” to ambushing because of the height of the bordering dunes. He emphasized that in leaving the road to offer rescue, the Samaritan was responding to the call of a “man of another race,” thereby projecting the “I” into “thou” and taking risks for his “brother.”

“If I do not stop to help with man, what will happen to him? … If I do not stop to help the sanitation workers, what will happen to them?”

In this century, my wife, Wanda, and I journeyed from teaching in Egypt to take up the implicit challenge in King’s speech and walk that road. The dunes are still there; there is still a risk in leaving that road. The decision to venture out is no less burdened with complex considerations of gender, race, class, religion and ethnicity than it ever was before. And when I think of my dad, King, John Lewis and thousands of others, from Jersey City to Darfur, who choose to take that chance and leave the road and risk the dunes, sometimes with eloquence and sometimes in silence—I still get those chills.

Read other accounts on Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.:

Before MLK, None of My Accomplishments Would Have Been Possible
DiversityInc’s Denyse Leslie, senior vice president of consulting, draws a parallel between Dr. King’s firsts (first arrest, first book published, first Black man to win the Nobel Peace Prize) and the firsts of Blacks still alive (or recently deceased) as they live out Dr. King’s vision.

Civil-Rights Progress: Helping LGBT Youth
GLSEN’s Executive Director Dr. Eliza Byard notes how Dr. King’s message that Black people would eventually reach the promised land is a reminder today that progress, no matter how slow, is crucial.

How Has Dr. King’s Legacy Changed Lives?
While Hurricane Irene hit during the Martin Luther King Jr. National Memorial dedication, R. Fenimore Fisher reflected on how Dr. King’s actions changed the law that changed society.

What Dr. King Really Meant: The Obligation That Benefits Everyone
Why is the business case for diversity a reality and not just a theory? It is directly due to Dr. King and the civil-rights era, explains DiversityInc CEO Luke Visconti.

Watch Raymond Brown speak on human rights and segregation. For more on Black History and the civil-rights movement, read “Discover America′s Black History” and “Re-Centering the History in Black History.”

The post Taking Risks for Your Brothers: The Power of Dr. King’s Words appeared first on DiversityInc.