COLOMBIA – There is a story that Carl and Mary Brown’s adopted children love to tell.
At any moment, sweets and candies were hidden throughout the Elgin residence, creating an irresistible treasure hunt for their food. Once discovered, the hideout would be relocated.
It was an improvised game that also revealed to these young people with a disturbing past the innate kindness and loving nature of the family.
“They showed me who God is only through their actions,” said Mackenzie Brown, one of the 200 children the Browns raised over 44 years, in a video in honor of the couple in 2016.
Carl Brown, considered the most staunch advocate for child welfare in a state that ran the South Carolina Parent Foster Association, died on February 26 at the age of 81.
“Carl has always been an example man. He didn’t just talk about it, he actually took care of children in the system for years and even adopted it, ”said Enid Jenkins, director of the state’s Lowcountry Department of Social Services. “Carl wanted to help do what was necessary to keep children in the least restrictive environment possible, so this is a tremendous loss for us.”
The path towards the Browns’ call began in the early 1970s, when they raised brothers who would become their first adoptions. They would adopt six children, including Mackenzie, in addition to having three biological children.
“It was the best thing we’ve ever done,” Carl Brown told The Sumter Item about raising foster parents in 2018. “It has become part of our lives, almost all of our lives.”
Named “Angels in Adoption” by the Congressional Coalition on Adoption Institute in 2014, the Browns helped to defend children. In 2018, they supported a measure sanctioned by Governor Henry McMaster that gave adoptees aged 18 or older access to their birth certificates.
McMaster appointed Brown to a 2018 advisory panel that recommended hiring Michael Leach to administer the DSS, which McMaster did.
State Sen. Katrina Shealy, R-Lexington, served with Brown on that committee.
“Carl and Mary worked tirelessly with the Adoptive Parents Association and changed the lives of so many children,” Shealy told The Post and Courier in a statement. Carl will be sorely missed by many who knew him and the many children he brought into his home as if it were his own. “
One was Christopher Brown, another of his adopted children, who said that growing up under the Browns’ roof not only gave him a sense of personal worth, but instilled in him what it means to be a family.
“Going through these doors, for us to grow up here and move, changes you,” said Christopher Brown in a tribute video. “It is not like growing up in a normal home. You learn that there is a definition of family that goes beyond just blood. “
Brown’s work was not limited to South Carolina.
In 1987, while serving as vice president of the International Association of Adoptive Parents, he testified before a state panel in Florida that he was exploring how to address the homelessness problem for foster children in the State of the Sun.
“We need to recognize that adoptive parents are professional parents,” said Brown, according to a report in the South Florida Sun-Sentinel newspaper. “We tend to treat these houses as a cheap hotel.”
Jenkins said the state’s host community was shaken by Brown’s unexpected death, but the legacy he built will continue through the hundreds of professional development and training courses he offered to prospective adoptive parents.
As of January 1, about 3,937 children were in foster homes across the state, and more than 2,300 family placements were required, according to data from the DSS.
“It opened up a whole new world for some of our older adults, who realized that they still had something they could give their child. I just can’t believe Carl Brown is gone, ”said Jenkins. “But when you have done all the work for which God has called you, he will touch you and say: ‘feel yourself a servant, work well done’. It was Carl. “
Follow Adam Benson on Twitter @ AdamNewshound12.