George W. Brodie was born in Kentucky and received his schooling from Cincinnati clergyman John W. Alvord during the 1830. Little else is known about his early life. By the early 1850s, he had settled in Chatham, Canada West, where he operated a grocery store with William Sterritt and used his storefront as a real estate office. Brodie was active in local black affairs. He endorsed the Provincial Free man's antibegging stance and supported the paper through his business advertisements.

As a member of the Chatham Vigilance Committee, he helped mobilize public support for those arrested in the Sylvanus Demarest rescue (1858). In the late 1850s, he was corresponding secretary for the Dawn Committee-a group of Chatham blacks who litigated for control of the British-American Institute property-and was secretary to the General Board of Commissioners of the National Emigration Convention at its 1858 Chatham convention. Brodie joined the African Methodist Episcopal clergy in the mid-1850s. He was appointed secretary of the denomination's general conference in 1856 and spoke out at that meeting against the presence of black slaveholders in the denomination.

He helped found the British Methodist Episcopal church that same year, but during the early 1860s, he joined with other BME dissidents in breaking away to establish the Independent Methodist Episcopal denomination. Brodie's most notable accomplishments came after the Civil War, when he returned to the AME ranks. In 1866 he was appointed one of six superintendents responsible for directing AME mission work among the southern freedmen. He was based in Raleigh, North Carolina, where he became a leader of the city's black community.

The black clergy man served as secretary of the AME's missionary department from 1872 to 1876 and remained active in the denomination into the 1880s. He was the first cashier of the Raleigh Freedmen's Savings Bank after it opened in 1868, and he served as director of the North Carolina Insane Asylum during the following decade.

Source:
The Black Abolitionist Papers: Volume II, University of North Carolina Press: Chapel Hill and London, 1986, pp. 333-34