Dean Fred Peebles announced the formation of the College of Engineering’s Minority Engineering Scholarship Program (MESP) in 1973, and Fred D. Brown Jr. led the program from 1975 to 1985 as its first director. The program was designed to motivate highly qualified African American youths to choose engineering careers. Thanks in large part to Brown’s hard work in traveling throughout Tennessee to recruit outstanding candidates for the program and his nurturing of them as students, the program became a national model and helped to open the engineering profession to minorities. In 1999 the MESP was renamed the Diversity Engineering Scholarship Program and was incorporated into the Engineering Professional Practice Program.
Brown graduated from Hall High School in Alcoa and earned the BS from Tuskegee Institute. He did graduate work at UT, Tennessee State, Fisk, and Vanderbilt. Before coming to UT, he taught at Hall High School and at Oak Ridge High School for 17 years. He was the first African American teacher at Oak Ridge High and became the first African American member of the Alcoa Board of Education. He retired from UT in 1985.
An endowment in the College of Engineering, dedicated to providing scholarships to deserving minority engineering students, bears his name. The study in the Estabrook Hall Minority Engineering Office was dedicated January 21, 1987, as the Fred D. Brown Jr. Memorial Library and Study, and a portrait of Brown was placed in the library/study. On October 8, 1999, Brown was inducted into the UT Knoxville African American Hall of Fame.
On March 1, 2013, the UT Board of Trustees approved the recommendation of Chancellor Jimmy Cheek that the new residence hall under construction on Andy Holt Avenue be named the Fred D. Brown Jr. Residence Hall, the first time a UT building had been named for an African American. The seven-hundred-bed residence hall opened for fall 2014.