Meet Alumna Christina Brown: Community Activist, Civic Leader, Change Maker

This year, Christina D. Brown (A&S ’10) won the Emerging Leader Award from the University of Cincinnati, an annual award that honors alumni who are “blazing the trails toward becoming our future leaders.”

But at one point, Brown didn’t even think she’d go to college. She thought she’d follow in her mother’s footsteps: graduate from high school, get a stable job, retire. Brown was the kid who had to be forced to go outside. She was always the last to do everything—ride a bike, climb a tree, join a team. 

Then, as a student at Mifflin High School in Columbus, Ohio, she toured a historically black college and discovered a whole new world. Higher education had already started to look more appealing when, in 2005, she was recruited to tour UC by Images of Color, an organization tasked with bringing minorities to the university. She remembers taking a shuttle down from Columbus to UC’s campus, not knowing what to expect. 

The organization did its job well; Brown fell in love with the campus and the community. For someone who usually was the last to do something, she became the first in her family to enroll in college. 

But what she didn’t fall in love with, initially, was a single area of study. The controversial 2000 election between George W. Bush and Al Gore had, however, piqued her interest in political science. She remembered the climate of confusion that swept across the country, especially concerning the voting recount in Florida. 

“Nobody could tell us who won,” said the 27-year-old. “I started picking up bits and pieces: Gore won? But he didn’t? No one could explain that process to me.” 

Though she wasn’t sure what kind of career path existed for a political science major, Brown began to find her passion in politics and issues of law. 

Learning community lessons 

Her first act of involvement at UC included doing something countless students do—she joined a learning community, an interdisciplinary group of students that help each other with coursework. Instantly, she found a home for her ideas outside of her own mind.

“I was having conversations with other people that originally I was just having with myself,” Brown said. “We all had different opinions, but we also all had interest in how the government shaped those opinions.” 

She also started becoming active in campus organizations, like Phi Alpha Delta, a co-ed law fraternity spread across the nation. She eventually served as its vice president. 

Then, a member of her learning community decided to start a Facebook page they thought was private in order to spread racist vitriol. Brown says that even though the page was deleted, the issue was never fully resolved. 

The incident inspired her to join the United Black Student Association. Though she was a freshman, Brown became the group’s Political Action Cultural Education chair and began working to provide an on-campus platform to help amplify the voices of black students and foster diverse communities. She’d later serve two terms as UBSA’s president. 

“All my interests were spread out, but they were all focused on social justice in different ways,” Brown said. 

As a double-major in Africana studies and political science, Brown found refuge in courses like “Black Women in Politics” and a senior thesis capstone centered around charismatic leadership. These eye-opening classes help Brown discover her own leadership potential and burnished her desire to approach issues from unique perspectives. 

Building community connections 

Some students graduate from college and never look back. Not Brown. Maintaining close connections with other alumni, many of whom she had mentored, has been paramount to Brown in ensuring her own success. She believes it’s important to offer counsel to current students like her own mentors did for her. 

“I don’t have my life figured out at all,” she said. “But if I can sit down with a student leader who’s stressed or has ideas that they can’t flesh out. I can offer a listening ear and speak to what my experiences are and what I’ve learned.” 

Brown devotes countless hours equipping students — who she calls family — with resources in the community so that they can make the most of their time at UC. 

She sees investments of her time like these not as chores, but as social and educational musts. “It’s a matter of helping students be engaged,” Brown said. “I don’t think it’s ever too late to fight for justice, whatever that looks like for you. Wherever you begin is the right place because it’s where you are.” 

She may identify as an introvert, but Brown is also a self-described radical. She stormed former UC president Nancy Zimpher’s office to directly protest what she calls a “lack of transparency.” She said the students on campus today are “a little nicer” than she was, but she praises the activism happening now — including groups like The Irate 8 — which she says is leading to a healthier academic environment. “People are publicly expressing how they view wrongs playing out on campus. That’s something I support.” 

Starting new communities 

It was Brown’s intense dedication and engagement that led to a startling revelation. In 2014, during a candlelight vigil held in response to the unrest in Ferguson, Missouri, after the death of Michael Brown, she found herself uncomfortable rather than comforted. 

“None of it engaged millennials,” she said of the gathering. As she stood in the silent church full of crowded mourners and soft firelight, Brown longed for a space that would create further dialogue about the police violence and institutional racism she says has gone mostly unaddressed in Cincinnati. 

With the help from other local activists, Brown founded the Cincinnati chapter of Black Lives Matter. 

“We were just a group of strangers deciding our needs weren’t met,” Brown said. “So we created space to educate folks and protest in a way that was safe and community-building.” 

Her untiring passion for grassroots activism and social justice caught the attention of WLWT earlier this year, and they named her as someone on the frontier of a “new generation” of civil rights leaders in the city. 

Brown’s words crackle with a current of electricity ignited by her passion for social justice. She said many of her core beliefs about making change were sparked by classroom discussions as a political science and Africana Studies student. 

She can’t remember the names of all the professors who inspired her, but one stands out above all. 

She remembers the late Terry Kershaw of Africana Studies as someone who helped her forge a distinct path toward community service. Kershaw introduced Brown to the term “scholar-activism,” a term that soon became the crux of Brown’s post-graduate mission, a way to merge scholarly classrooms and textbooks with the streets and board meetings more immediate change occurs in. 

“We weren’t just thinking about work as written or academic,” Brown said. “We were thinking about what it looks like in the real world. How do we improve the conditions of people? Before that, I never thought that education could be transformational, that it could actually change people’s lives.” 

At the same time, Brown learned that academia is not always a safe place for those with marginalized identities. She learned that sometimes the best classroom is actually outside traditional rooms in spaces where more real relationships can be forged. “My goal is to center the most marginalized, to create space for people to tell their own story,” Brown said. “My job is to interpret these stories and to translate them.” 

As a translator and public speaker, Brown leads by example. She has organized rallies protesting police brutality, penned op-eds for The Cincinnati Enquirer on racial equity, been showcased by CincyStories and CityBeat and given TED Talks. She has also served as a go-to authority on local panels discussing social issues. She amplifies her leadership on critical social issues at her full-time job as president of the Walnut Hills Redevelopment Foundation Board.

Below, watch Brown discuss her activism and work in a clip from CincyStories.