A native of Wilmington, North Carolina, Samuel Joseph Worthington Brown, Jr. was around ten years old when he and his family joined the northern migration and settled in Philadelphia. He attended James Logan Elementary School, and in 1926 he graduated from South Philadelphia High School. After school hours were spent working for a local silkscreen painter. For four years he studied art education at the Pennsylvania Museum and School of Industrial Art which later split into the Philadelphia Museum of Art and the University of the Arts. He continued his studies at the University of Pennsylvania and earned the equivalent of a Master of Fine Arts degree.
Beginning around 1926 and into the 1950s, Brown shared a studio with Dox Thrash and for a while they ran a sign painting enterprise. In 1933 Fiske Kimball, director of the Philadelphia Museum of Art and head of a local New Deal program, selected Brown as the first African American artist for the Public Works of Art Project (PWAP), the earliest New Deal program to employ artists. Inspired in part by George Biddle, the PWAP lasted less than a year, but transitioned into the Federal Art Project (FAP) of the Works Progress Administration. From 1935 to 1938 Brown was part of the FAP easel division and a printmaker in the fine print workshop. He worked as a substitute art teacher in Camden, New Jersey, during the early 1930s, and in 1938 started to teach full time for the Philadelphia school district.
During this time Brown’s work began to be noticed. The Harmon Foundation included two paintings in a 1933 exhibition, and that same year a drawing called The Problem was on the cover of The Crisis, the magazine of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. Fiske Kimball recognized his talent: “I am happy to say that we all felt the work he did for us was among the best and most striking we had from any of our employed artists, and he certainly ranks as one of the finds of the Public Works Project.”
A watercolor of a tired scrub woman was selected for a Corcoran Gallery, Washington, DC, exhibition of PWAP artists; it was seen and remembered by Eleanor Roosevelt. Later, in 1946, she purchased a series of posters on global peace and brotherhood that Brown had created and gave them to the Hyde Park, New York, elementary school. Brown described his poster endeavor as: “the realization of an artist’s dream for the glorification of the Negro child, and the fostering of good will through portraying children of all races in scenes encouraging to correct behavior patterns. Each Poster is the result of hours of thoughtful study, and each has been rendered as a fine art gem. They stand in their simplicity, a beautiful tribute to our children.”
Versatile in several media, Brown seems to have preferred watercolor and his style was that of a realist. Although he painted a variety of subjects, he had a decided interest in portraying people. Following his retirement from teaching in 1971, he continued to paint and also explored sculpture and jewelry-making. He traveled to Nassau on his honeymoon in 1938 and spent the summer of 1945 touring Mexico. The paintings that resulted were exhibited the following year at the African American-owned Barnett-Aden Gallery, in Washington, DC, the city's first commercial gallery to display works by racially diverse artists.. Both Alma Thomas and James Herring were instrumental in the running of the gallery which showed the work of many notable artists including Elizabeth Catlett, Romare Bearden, Loïs Mailou Jones, and Selma Burke.
Brown was active in a number of endeavors, including the Tra Club in Philadelphia, an informal art association promoting African American art, becoming President in 1932. It was also at the Tra Club where he met fellow artist Dox Thrash. He was an early member of the Pyramid Club, a center in Philadelphia for African American life and culture, where he exhibited alongside Claude Clark, Beauford Delaney, Joseph Delaney, and Rex Goreleigh. Both held annual exhibitions, and Brown was a regular participant.