Dr. Andrew F. Brimmer, American Economic Prophet, dies at 86

Dr. Andrew F. Brimmer, the son of a Louisiana sharecropper and the first African-American appointed as a member of the Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve System, died Sunday at the age of 86.

Unlike many within the Federal Reserve who are seen as allies of powerful Wall Street Financial houses, Brimmer spent his life warning Americans about the growing disparity between the poor and the wealthy, and the effect that the outsourcing of American investment would have on low-income Americans.

And that was 30 years ago.

Brimmer earned an  undergraduate degree in economics at the University of Washington – Seattle in 1950 and a master’s degree the following year. He then studies economics in India before attending the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and Harvard, where he earned a doctorate.

He served as a staff economist to the Federal Reserve Board, and was the Assistant Secretary of Commerce for Economic Affairs in Washington when he was appointed to the Fed Board of Governors by President Johnson.  Having travelled extensively in India and Africa, his particular concern at the time was the outsourcing of American investment dollars and jobs overseas, and the resulting growing schism in America between the very poor and the wealthy. Controversial at the time, he revealed a growing “schism” between middle-class American blacks who were educated and had marketable skills, and a black underclass that lacked access to education and jobs.

The Wall Street Journal criticized his Fed Board tenure.  At a time when racial tensions were high, the Journal ran one front-page headline reading “Desire to Aid Negroes Could Make New ‘Fed’ Member More Liberal.” 

Dr. Brimmer was part of a federal delegation sent to Los Angeles after the 1965 rioting in Watts (Los Angeles) that left 34 people dead and tens of millions of dollars in property damage. He organized a study that revealed that the purchasing power of the average family in Watts had declined by $400 in the five years preceding the riots, while at the same time all other groups in America had experienced rising incomes. 

“I do feel that the economic plight of blacks is a serious matter,” he told The New York Times in 1973. “So I bring the same economist’s tool kit to that subject as other economists bring to examine other national economic problems.”