The Study Center is named in honor of Mildred D. Brown, founder of the Omaha Star Newspaper in 1938. The Omaha Star is Nebraska’s only Black owned newspaper. Mildred Brown was born in Bessemer, Alabama, in 1915 to Rev. and Mrs. Bennie J. Brown, a prominent African-American family. Her mother was a teacher. They encouraged her education. In 1931 Mildred graduated from Miles College, an historically black college founded in Birmingham, Alabama by the Christian Methodist Episcopal Church. Mildred worked as a teacher in Birmingham, where she met and married S. Edward Gilbert, a pharmacy graduate of Howard University. They moved to Chicago, where Mildred studied at Chicago Normal College, and then to Des Moines, Iowa, where she took journalism at Drake University. The Omaha Star “Dedicated to the service of the people that no good cause shall lack a champion and that evil shall not go unopposed”