Brooke, Edward

Source:

 African American National Biography

Brooke, Edward

(26 Oct. 1919– ),

lawyer and U.S. senator, was born Edward William Brooke III in Washington, D.C., to Edward Brooke Jr., an attorney for the Veterans Administration, and Helen Seldon. Growing up in an integrated middle-class neighborhood, Brooke readily absorbed his mother's instruction to respect others and treat all people equally. The Brookes lived relatively free from much of the racism endured by other African Americans. “We never felt hated,” his mother recalled (Cutler, 14). Brooke attended Dunbar High School, an elite public school with many middle- and upper-class African American students and then went on to Howard University, where he became president of the school's chapter of the Alpha Phi Alpha fraternity and earned his bachelor's degree in 1941. Following the bombing of Pearl Harbor later that year, Brooke was drafted into an all-black combat unit in the army. He served in many roles, including as a defender of those who had been court-martialed. His tour of duty during World War II took him to Africa and to Italy, and he earned a Bronze Star for leading an attack on a military battery. While in Italy he met his wife, Remigia Ferrair-Scacco, who had served in the underground resistance against the Nazis. The couple married in 1947 and later had two daughters.

Brooke enrolled in law school at Boston University in 1946. He became editor of the law review during his final year of school and went on to earn LLB and LLM degrees. Brooke then practiced law in the Roxbury area of Boston, where he witnessed firsthand the problems African Americans faced regarding housing, education, employment, and health care. At the same time, he worked as legal counsel for the local chapter of the NAACP and served on the board of directors of the Greater Boston Urban League. He lobbied the state legislature for the elimination of segregation in the state's National Guard units and worked on an appeal to the U.S. Supreme Court to outlaw segregation in railroad dining cars. Brooke was also very active in the AMVETS, an organization for World War II veterans, and in 1956 he served as the National Judge Advocate for the group.

In 1950 Brooke's friends persuaded him to run for the state legislature. A Republican in a heavily Democratic state, he lost the election and vowed never to run for office again, in part because his wife was upset over campaign talk about their mixed marriage. He nonetheless ran for the legislature two years later but lost again. Brooke narrowly lost another election in 1960, this time for secretary of state for Massachusetts. Although he had failed in his quest for political office, Brooke won the respect of numerous leaders in the state's Republican Party and soon accepted an appointment to the Boston Finance Commission. He quickly earned a reputation as a tough crime fighter as he exposed corruption in several city agencies, including the police department.

Edward Brooke, at his office in Boston, Massachusetts, 22 January 1964. (AP Images.)

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In 1962 Brooke was elected as Massachusetts attorney general, becoming the first African American ever to win such a statewide position. He first won a difficult primary battle, overcoming strong objections from Republican leaders concerning his liberalism and inexperience, and then went on to win the general election by appealing to white voters on the strength of his personal charm and his record with the Boston Finance Commission. As would be the case throughout his career, Brooke resisted attempts to label him a “black” politician. He commented, “I'm the lawyer for the five million citizens of Massachusetts, not for its … Negroes” (Cutler, 117). He did not ignore racial matters, however. While in office Brooke filed a brief in support of a fair housing law and helped draft legislation to forbid employment discrimination by businesses and unions. A firm believer in gradual change through legal means, he clashed with civil rights leaders over their plans to have students boycott school for a day, which would have violated the state's truancy laws, to protest de facto segregation in Boston.

Brooke's triumph as an African American in an overwhelmingly white state propelled him into national Republican debates in 1964. Like other liberal Republicans, Brooke grew alarmed at the conservative movement's efforts to nominate the Arizona senator Barry Goldwater, who had voted against the 1964 Civil Rights Act, as the party's presidential candidate that year. Attending the Republican convention in San Francisco, Brooke urged the party to adopt a strong civil rights plank and seconded the nomination of Governor William Scranton of Pennsylvania, a more moderate candidate on race and other issues, for president. Goldwater withstood the Scranton challenge, and Brooke, like several other northeastern liberals, refused to support the Arizonan that fall. Although Goldwater suffered a crushing defeat in November, Brooke was overwhelmingly reelected as Massachusetts attorney general.

Two years later Brooke won election to the U.S. Senate. The victory marked him as the first black senator since Reconstruction and as the first African American to win a Senate seat by popular vote. As conservatives gained influence within the Republican Party nationally, Brooke continued to support many of President Lyndon Johnson's social-welfare Great Society programs. Brooke even attacked Johnson on occasion for doing too little to combat poverty, and in 1966 he published his views on racial and economic problems facing black Americans in The Challenge of Change. He also became deeply involved in debates over the future of the Republican Party. Although he once again refused to make his race an issue, Brooke urged the party to broaden its appeal beyond white, middle-class suburbanites by reaching out to African Americans and other minorities. Many political pundits saw him as a leader who could bring at least some of the black vote back to the party of Abraham Lincoln. Soon after his election, there was speculation among some Republicans, as well as in the media, that Brooke would make an excellent choice for the Republican vice-presidential nomination in 1968.

Brooke was at the center of debates over the racial violence of the mid- and late 1960s. Following enormously destructive riots in the summer of 1967 in Newark, New Jersey, and Detroit, Michigan, President Johnson chose Brooke to serve on his Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders (also known as the Kerner Commission). Brooke toured several riot-torn areas and firmly rejected conservative claims that the riots were the result of communist influence or a conspiracy among radical black leaders. Instead, he insisted that the riots stemmed from social and economic problems related to jobs, housing, education, and health care. At the same time, Brooke held to his beliefs in integration and peaceful change. He worried that the media gave too much attention to more radical black leaders, such as Stokely Carmichael, and he rejected Black Power, calling it “a turn in the wrong direction” (Cutler, 197). In 1968 Brooke worked closely with Senator Walter Mondale of Minnesota, a liberal Democrat, on behalf of the Fair Housing Act.

During the late 1960s and early 1970s Brooke regularly criticized Richard Nixon's civil rights policies. He blasted the president for his early approach to school desegregation in the South and for not following through on his promise to promote economic development in the inner cities through “black capitalism.” Worried that Nixon was too eager to appeal to white southerners and suburbanites, Brooke played a prominent role in successful efforts to defeat Nixon's nominations of the conservatives Clement Haynsworth and G. Harrold Carswell to the Supreme Court. He also opposed the nomination of William H. Rehnquist out of concern about his right-wing views on civil rights, though the Senate confirmed Rehnquist.

Brooke won reelection in 1972 but lost six years later, in part because of press revelations that he had lied about his personal finances in a deposition related to his divorce that year from his wife. Brooke was never charged with any crime, however, and the Senate Ethics Committee absolved him of any wrongdoing. In 1979 he became head of the National Low-Income Housing Coalition, resumed practicing law in Virginia, and married Anne Fleming. The couple had one son, Edward W. Brooke IV. In 2002 Brooke underwent successful surgery for breast cancer, and subsequently launched an effort to alert men to the dangers of this relatively rare disease among men. A recipient of the NAACP's Spingarn Medal for black achievement in 1967, and the Presidental Medal of Freedom in 2004, Brooke symbolizes the post–World War II rise of African Americans to prominent political positions, as well as his generation's faith in integration and working through established political and legal channels to achieve change. In 2009 Brooke was awarded the Congressional Gold Medal.

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