A native of Bowling Green, Kentucky, and graduate of Oberlin College in Ohio, Rev. Brumfield served as minister for the Des Moines, Iowa Union Congregational Church at 10th and Park St. from December 1912 to March 1914. An April 3, 1914 report in the Iowa State Bystander noted he was bid farewell by a large crowd of various creeds as he and his family had departed on March 31 for his “new charge in the southland.”

Brumfield finished an M.A. from the University of Chicago in 1928 while he taught at Fisk University in Nashville,Tennessee. He published a study of Black churches in Nashville. He died in 1967 and was buried in Greenwood Cemetery in Nashville.