"Floyd B.Brown"(April 27,1891-March 5,1921)

Founded the Fargo Agricultural School in Monroe County in 1919 to provide the equivalent of elementary and secondary vocational education for African American students.The school was for both day and residential students and was modeled after the Tuskegee University,which he attended learned practical skills intended to help them achieve success and economic security.He was born in Stampley Mississippi,the second of ten children and the son of African American tenant farmers Charles & Janie Brown.As a youth,Floyd worked with his father in the cotton fields of Mississippi and the cane fields of Louisiana.His mother,who had heard of the work of Booker T.Washington,encouraged him to enter Tuskegee,where he received a high school certificate in 1917.Booker had died in 1951,his influence at Tuskegee and in the U.S. was immense,and his legacy lived on for several generations.Floyd was ordained as a Baptist minister after studies at Phelps Hall Bible School on the Tuskegee campus.During the summer of 1915,Floyd visited Fargo (Monroe County) while selling biographies of Booker T.Washington,probably Up from Slavery,in eastern Arkansas.Fargo & nearby Zent (Monroe County) were primarily African American communities that lacked school facilities.He decided to return and start a school there patterned after Tuskegee.As he famously stated in his later autobiography ,"I returned... with $2.85 with faith in God and the people to start my mission work.Floyd borrowed money as an initial payment for twenty acres of land a short distance of Fargo.On January 1,1920,the school opened with one teacher,Ruth Mahon,and fifteen students in a one-room school;at the same time,he developed a board of trustees composed of both African Americans and whites.Floyd married Lillian Epps on March 5,1991,and she also taught classes as head of the home economics department.The couple had no children.The ideology that Floyd learned from Booker,at Tuskegee particularly equipped him to face the racial conflicts of the Arkansas Delta in the early 1920s.Floyd was never known to make direct references to racial violence,he must have been aware of the Elaine Massacre of 1919,which occurred just sixty miles to the south of Fargo.The indignities of Jim Crow and the horror of lynching were daily reminders of racial for African Americans.Floyd accommodated himself himself to segregation and to "liberal"whites in return for their support of the school.To his students,he argued that they must earn greater rights based on accomplishment,not confrontation,and he emphasized that they should not be ashamed to start at the bottom of the economic ladder,nor to work with their hands.Floyd stressed,as had Booker,what could be done rather than what should be done.The great depression years compounded the challenge's it was able to survive because of its farm.By 1945,the Fargo Agricultural school owned 550 acres of land,twelve buildings constructed by faculty and students,and enrollment of 180 day and residential students.The school's products sold for basic support,Floyd traveled extensively to raise additional funds from private individuals and businesses.One of the many aphorisms that Floyd used,"Work Will Win,"because the title of a documentary mad in 1994.In addition to his other activities,Floyd had a community service mission.He organized an annual Negro Farmers Conference for continuing education and groups to conduct annual maintenance of local cemeteries.In 1949,when the need for the school had diminished,he sold the campus to the state of Arkansas.The state used the campus for a new school,the Fargo,Training School for Negro Girls.Floyd served as principal until his retirement in 1954.In 1955,the Browns moved to Pine Bluff (Jefferson County) to live in a new home at 1401 Georgia Street.He died there six years later,and was buried at P.K. Miller Cemetery in Pine Bluff.