Edward Brooke, 1st Black Elected US Senator, Dies
He was not on the list.
CORAL GABLES (CBSMiami/AP) — The first black U.S. Senator to
win popular election to the Senate died Saturday at the age of 95 at his home
in Coral Gables.
Former U.S. Senator Edward Brooke died of natural causes,
said Ralph Neas, Brooke’s former chief counsel. Brooke was surrounded by his
family.
Brooke was elected to the Senate in 1966, becoming the first
black to sit in that branch from any state since Reconstruction and one of nine
blacks who have ever served there — including Barack Obama.
Brooke told The Associated Press he was “thankful to God”
that he lived to see Obama’s election. And the president was on hand in October
2009 when Brooke was presented with the Congressional Gold Medal, the highest
award Congress has to honor civilians. Obama hailed Brooke as “a man who’s
spent his life breaking barriers and bridging divides across this country.”
Incoming Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell recalled his
first impression of the newly elected senator when McConnell was a Senate
staffer and described Brooke as “a model of courage and honesty in office.”
“… even from across the Senate chamber, you could sense that
this was a Senator of historic importance,” the Kentucky Republican said in a
statement Saturday. “Indeed, he was.”
A Republican in a largely Democratic state, Brooke was one
of Massachusetts’ most popular political figures during most of his 12 years in
the Senate.
Massachusetts Democratic Gov. Deval Patrick, the state’s
first black governor, remembered Brooke for his unselfish public service.
“He carried the added honor and burden of being ‘the first’
and did so with distinction and grace,” Patrick said. “I have lost a friend and
mentor. America has lost a superb example of selfless service.”
Brooke earned his reputation as a Senate liberal in part by
becoming the first Republican senator to publicly urge President Richard Nixon
to resign. He helped lead the forces in favor of the Equal Rights Amendment and
was a defender of school busing to achieve racial integration, a bitterly
divisive issue in Boston.
He also lent his name to the Brooke amendment to the federal
housing act, passed in 1969, which limited to 25 percent the amount of income a
family must pay for rent in public housing.
However, late in his second term, Brooke divorced his wife
of 31 years, Remigia, in a stormy proceeding that attracted national attention.
Repercussions from the case spurred an investigation into
his personal finances by the Senate Ethics Committee and a probe by the state
welfare department and ultimately cost him the 1978 election. He was defeated
by Democrat Rep. Paul E. Tsongas.
Tsongas’ widow, U.S. Rep. Nikki Tsongas, said Saturday that
Brooke’s career was “as courageous as it was historic.”
In a Boston Globe interview in 2000, Brooke recalled the
pain of losing his bid for a third term.
“It was just a divorce case. It was never about my work in
the Senate. There was never a charge that I committed a crime, or even nearly
committed a crime,” Brooke said.
In 2008, pioneering newswoman Barbara Walters said she had
an affair with the then-married Brooke in the 1970s, but it ended before he
lost the 1978 election. She called him “exciting” and “brilliant.”
Brooke received the Presidential Medal of Freedom in a White
House ceremony in 2004. Five years later, when Brooke received the
congressional honor in Washington, he cited the issues facing Congress — health
care, the economy and the wars overseas — and called on lawmakers to put their
partisan differences aside.
“We’ve got to get together,” Brooke said, turning his eyes
to Senate GOP Leader McConnell. “We have no alternative. There’s nothing left.
It’s time for politics to be put aside on the back burner.”
As Brooke sought the Senate seat in 1966, profiles in the national
media reminded readers that he had won office handily in a state where blacks
made up just 2 percent of the population — the state that had also given the
nation its only Roman Catholic president, John F. Kennedy.
He beat Democrat Endicott Peabody, a former governor who
also supported civil rights, by a 3-to-2 margin despite predictions of a “white
backlash” against him.
Commenting on Brooke’s election and other developments that
day, Martin Luther King Jr. commented that “despite appeals to bigotry of an
intensity and vulgarity never before witnessed in the North, millions of white
voters remained unshaken in their commitment to decency.”
Brooke had parlayed his probes of local corruption into a
successful run for state attorney general in 1962 when he became the highest
ranking black elected official in the nation. He won re-election as attorney
general in 1964 even though Democrats dominated other races.
Somewhat aloof from the civil rights movement of the 1960s,
especially the militant wing, he said blacks had to win allies, not fight
adversaries. But he also said of civil rights leaders: “Thank God we have them.
But everyone has to do it in the best way he can.”
He had refused to endorse Sen. Barry Goldwater for president
in 1964, commenting later, “You can’t say the Negro left the Republican Party;
the Negro feels he was evicted from the Republican Party.”
The son of a Veterans Administration lawyer, Brooke was
raised in a middle-class black section of Washington, attending segregated
schools through his graduation from Howard University in 1941. He served in an
all-black combat unit in World War II, and later settled in Boston after
graduating from Boston University Law School.
Brooke was diagnosed with breast cancer in 2002 and went
public the following year, saying he wanted to encourage men to perform
self-examinations and advocating that insurance companies cover male
mammograms.
Brooke is survived by his second wife, Anne Fleming Brooke;
their son Edward Brooke IV; his daughters from his first marriage, Remi
Goldstone and Edwina Petit; stepdaughter Melanie Laflamme, and four
grandchildren.
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