Oakland, California Bio Oral Lee Brown was born in Batesville, Mississippi, and now lives in Oakland where she runs the Oral Lee Brown Foundation and works as a realtor. She has appeared on The Oprah Winfrey Show, Today, NBC Nightly News with Tom Brokaw, ABC’s World News Tonight with Peter Jennings, CNN’s Extra, Later Today, and Courage, an inspirational show hosted by Danny Glover. She has also been featured in Glamour, Ebony, and Essence magazines. In 2002, she was one of Glamour magazine’s Women of the Year. Project Description In The Promise: The Story of a Woman with a Big Heart and Even Bigger Dreams (Doubleday, Fall 2004), Oral Lee Brown, along with Caille Millner, tells the remarkable story of one woman’s unending desire to make a difference. Her difficult childhood in Batesville, Mississippi—where she endured years of mental and physical abuse, not to mention acts of racism beyond comprehension—coupled with the fact that she was sent a thousand miles from home when she was just twelve, provides the perfect backdrop for Brown’s success as an adult. In 1987, as a forty-eight-year-old Realtor making $45,000 a year, Brown walked into Brookfield Elementary, a school in the toughest section of East Oakland. Acting on impulse—and some would say on fate—she made a promise to all twenty-three students that if they stayed in school and graduated from high school, she would pay to send them to college. In 1999, twelve years after Brown pledged her support, nineteen of the twenty-three students realized their dream, and she made good on her promise, paying each student’s tuition from the money she saved through her eponymous foundation. Then in 2001, showing that there are no limits to her intense spirit of will, Brown adopted another group of students—this time, twenty ninth-graders, twenty fifth-graders, and twenty first-graders—and made the same promise.