Financial History Issue 118 (Summer 2016) | Page 28

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The Fed has had two black governors
since Brimmer: Emmett Rice, nominated
by President Jimmy Carter in 1979, and
Roger Ferguson, nominated by President
Bill Clinton in 1997.
According to Brimmer’s obituary in
Bloomberg, Ferguson said in a 2002 speech
to college students that, as a teenager
growing up in Washington in 1966, he followed newspaper accounts of Brimmer’s
barrier-breaking appointment and, in the
process, “became absolutely fascinated
with economics and with this institution,
the Federal Reserve.”
Brimmer served on the Tuskegee University board of directors from 1965 to
2010 and as the board’s chairman for  28
years, making him the longest-serving
chairman in the school’s history. The institute’s business school building is named
for Brimmer.
He published several books, including
Life Insurance Companies in the Capital
Market (1962), The World Banking System:
Outlook in a Context of Crisis (1985) and
Trends, Prospects & Strategies for Black
Economic Progress (1985).
Brimmer was born in Newellton, Louisiana, in 1926. He was the son of a sharecropper and had no choice but to attend
segregated schools. He served in the Army
for just a few months at the tail end of
World War II.
In an interview with the Harvard Crimson in 1974, Brimmer described his journey from the South in the context of US
history. “I was part of the same outwardbound stream of people — literally thousands of them — that had migrated out
of the area since World War I, although
interrupted by the Depression, of course,”
he said. “It was Steinbeck’s