Lloyd L. Brown, 89; Novelist Helped Write Robeson’s Life Story

Lloyd L. Brown, 89, a novelist and journalist who helped write Paul Robeson’s autobiography “Here I Stand,” died April 1 at his home in New York of causes associated with aging.

A native of St. Paul, Minn., Brown went to Europe in the 1930s as a freelance journalist and served in the Army Air Force during World War II.

Later he became managing editor of New Masses, a weekly journal that published works by literary figures such as Ralph Ellison, Langston Hughes and Richard Wright.

In 1950, Brown began working with Robeson, an actor and civil rights advocate, helping him to write a column for a Harlem newspaper that Robeson founded. Later Brown helped Robeson write the autobiography, published in 1958.

Brown drew on his experience as a trade union organizer in the Midwest to write the 1951 novel “Iron City,” which was reissued in 1994 by the Northeastern Library of Black Literature.

He also contributed articles to such publications as the New York Times, including an op-ed article in 1973 discussing discrimination in the military during his World War II service.

Brown wrote that, in Salina, Kan., where he was stationed, restaurants would serve German prisoners of war who worked at area grain elevators, but shunned black soldiers. “If we were ... in Nazi Germany,” he wrote, “they would break our bones. As ‘colored’ men in Salina, they only break our hearts.”