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Rose M. Brewer
Co-author of The Color of Wealth:
The Story Behind the U.S. Racial Wealth Divide

“I grew up in Tulsa, Oklahoma, but the elders rarely spoke of that time when homes went up in flames. There was a large Klan membership in post-World War I Tulsa, and the state of Oklahoma incorporated the racial practices of the Jim Crow South: segregated schools, housing and public accommodations. A prosperous entrepreneurial sector called Greenwood emerged in North Tulsa. But the symbols of Black prosperity did not sit well with white supremacist thinking. So the Greenwood neighborhood was destroyed…
My family understood the dangers as well as the possibilities of ‘being somebody’. But that was always encouraged. Thus I grew up in the cauldron of racism, but also in the midst of a community that expected much from her children, believed in us, and expected us to fly.”
-- from The Color of Wealth

Rose M. Brewer, PhD, is Associate Professor and Morse Alumni Distinguished Teaching Professor of African American & African Studies at the University of Minnesota.

She is a contributing editor to Souls, an interdisciplinary journal of the Institute for Contemporary Black History at Columbia.

She is the author of “Gender, Race and Social Policy: African Americans and the U.S. Social Welfare State,” in Women’s International Policy Forum (1998). She co-edited Bridges of Power: Women’s Multicultural Alliances (New Society Publishers, 1990) and Is Academic Feminism Dead? (NYU, 1998). She is on the editorial board of the National Journal of Sociology.

Rose was a long-time board member of United for a Fair Economy (UFE) and of Project South: Institute for the Elimination of Poverty and Genocide. She cofounded and continues to be an active member of the Black Radical Congress.