Victorio Acosta Velasco

Michael Serizawa Brown is an attorney based in Seattle Washington, where he also teaches courses on history and law as adjunct faculty at various postsecondary institutions in the Puget Sound area. He was born in Tachikawa, Japan of a Japanese mother and a Caucasian father and has thus lived, from earliest memory, with the knowledge and realities of being of mixed racial blood in late 20th century America. It was this knowledge, along with firsthand awareness of the realities of racial hierarchies and their perpetuation in often unconscious, subtle ways, which led him to decide to write a biography of an Asian male's experience in the United States. This often parallels the experience of African-Americans in the pre-Civil Rights Movement era. He has been an active member of the Washington State Bar Association since 1996. He has published numerous articles on legal history and Asian-American history in a variety of academic journals, including the University of West Los Angeles Law Review, Pacific Northwest Quarterly, Maine History, and encyclopedias on Asian-American history and American law. He holds a Ph.D. from Washington State University, a J.D. from Temple University's Beasley School of Law in Philadelphia; an M.A. from the University of Maine; and a B.A. in art from Whitman College in southeastern Washington. Since the late 1980s, he has been a fervent advocate of civil rights.