Edward W. Brooke, who had a distinguished career in the U.S. Army during World War II and as the Massachusetts Attorney General, and who also authored the books “The Challenge of Change: Crisis in Our Two-Party System” (1966), and “Bridging the Divide” in 2006, was the first Protestant Republican African-American who won the populist vote by 95-percent in a mostly white Catholic Democrat state, and was thus elected to the U.S. Senate in 1966.
In his own words in TIME magazine following his election “I do not intend to be a national leader of the Negro people. I intend to do my job as a senator from Massachusetts.”
Shortly after his election, in which he made a major influence in anti-poverty laws, his promising political career unraveled over allegations of financial impropriety regarding private loans.
Brooke, a liberal Black Republican from Massachusetts, was one of only two African-Americans to serve in the Senate before 1979. He was the first to serve since the Reconstruction Era, and only six African Americans have served in the Senate since he left office.
Brooke grew up in a racially divided Washington, D.C., one that remains that way to this day.
The story told is that Brooke “towed” the centrist line between civil rights leaders and conservative members of his own party. In D.C., he served on the Senate Appropriations Committee, giving him influence over commerce, monetary and housing policy.
He lived up to his promise not to become a “Negro Leader” and played down race, with trepidation in one hand in order to push for civil rights legislation in the other.
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It was apparently a very delicate balancing act, because though it is said that he opposed two Nixon nominees for the U.S. Supreme Court over civil rights issues, he also refused to join the Congressional Black Caucus (CBC), even though he spoke at its annual convention as a Statesman and Elder.
During the Watergate scandal, he was the first Senate Republican to call for President Richard M. Nixon’s resignation. and he is noted as also having fought against the NAACP’s action to boycott Boston’s public schools in protest of the city’s ‘de facto’ segregation. He was very much in favor of school desegregation in America, but he didn’t want people breaking the law in order to protest it.
Many Black people today would call him a sellout, but behind that public facade was a Black man determined to go the legal route in order to make gains in Black America that had not been made before his time.
He and Walter Mondale (D-Minn.) co-sponsored the Fair Housing Act of 1968, which prohibited discrimination based on race, color, religion or ethnicity.
He stated in 1967 “It’s not purely a Negro problem. It’s a social and economic problem — an American problem.”
He later introduced the Equal Credit Opportunity Act, which allowed women to obtain credit independent of their husbands, which passed and became law.
Married to an Italian woman from whom he filed for divorce in 1976, some disenchanting news came out during the depositions after she contested the filing.
He was charged with welfare fraud after concealing his own mother’s finances in order to help her qualify for Medicaid assistance while she lived in a nursing home. He also wrongly reported a disclosed “loan from a friend” during his Senate investigation on the charges. Barbara Walters also confessed that she had had a long-term affair with the Senator while he was married.
Though he ended up losing his storied political career because of the financial defalcations in his personal dealings, he went on to become chairman of the National Low Income Housing Coalition.
Brooke died today at the age of 95 after more than 10 years of battling breast cancer, a rare disease in men. He lived in Coral Gables, FL.
Hiram Revels of Mississippi was the first black U.S. Senator, not Ed Brooke!