Edward Brooke
Edward William Brooke III was an American lawyer and Republican Party politician who represented Massachusetts in the United States Senate from 1967 to 1979. He was the first African American elected to the United States Senate by popular vote. Prior to serving in the Senate, he served as the Attorney General of the Commonwealth of Massachusetts from 1963 until 1967. Edward Brooke was the first African-American since Reconstruction in 1874 to have been elected to the United States Senate and he was the first African-American since 1881 to have held a United States Senate seat. Brooke was also the first African-American U.S. senator to ever be re-elected. He was the longest-serving African-American U.S. senator at twelve years until surpassed by Tim Scott in 2025.
Born to a middle-class black family, Brooke was raised in Washington, D.C. After attending Howard University, he graduated from Boston University School of Law in 1948 after serving in the U.S. Army during World War II. Beginning in 1950, he became involved in politics, when he ran for a seat in the Massachusetts House of Representatives. After serving as chairman of the Boston Finance Commission, Brooke was elected attorney general in 1962, becoming the first African-American to be elected attorney general of any state.
He served as attorney general for four years, before running for Senate in 1966. In the election, he defeated Democratic former Governor Endicott Peabody in a landslide, and was seated on January 3, 1967. In the Senate, Brooke aligned with the liberal faction in the Republican party. He co-wrote the Civil Rights Act of 1968, which prohibited housing discrimination. He was re-elected to a second term in 1972, after defeating attorney John Droney. Brooke became a prominent critic of Republican President Richard Nixon, and was the first Senate Republican to call for Nixon's resignation in light of the Watergate scandal. In 1978, he ran for a third term, but was defeated by Democrat Paul Tsongas. After leaving the Senate, Brooke practiced law in Washington, D.C., and was affiliated with various businesses and nonprofit organizations. Brooke died in 2015, at his home in Coral Gables, Florida, at the age of 95, and was the last living former U.S. senator born in the 1910s.
Early life and education
Edward William Brooke III was born on October 26, 1919, in Washington, D.C., to a middle-class black family. His father Edward William Brooke Jr. was a lawyer and graduate of Howard University who worked with the Department of Veterans Affairs, and his mother was Helen Brooke. He was the second of three children. Brooke was raised in a racially segregated environment that was "insulated from the harsh realities of the Deep South", with Brooke rarely interacting with the white community. He attended Dunbar High School—then one of the most prestigious academic high schools for African Americans—and graduated in 1936. After graduating, he enrolled in Howard University, where he first considered studying in medicine, before ending up studying social studies and political science. Brooke graduated from university in 1941, with a bachelor of science degree, After serving in the U.S. Army during World War II, Brooke graduated from the Boston University School of Law in 1948. "I never studied much at Howard," he later reflected, "but at Boston University, I didn't do much else but study."Military service
Brooke enlisted in the United States Army in 1941 following the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. He was commissioned as a second lieutenant. He saw combat in Italy as a member of the segregated 366th Infantry Regiment. Brooke spent 195 days with his unit in Italy. There, his fluent Italian and his light skin enabled him to cross enemy lines to communicate with Italian partisans. By the end of the war, Brooke had attained the rank of captain, a Bronze Star Medal, and a Distinguished Service Award.Brooke's time in the army exposed him to the inequality and racism which existed in the army system. This, combined with the signing of Executive Order 9066, led him to rethink his support of Democratic President Franklin D. Roosevelt. His time in the army also changed his perception of race, with him meeting his future-wife Remigia Ferrari-Scacco in Italy. He reasoned that "race had not mattered during our courtship in Italy, and therefore it should not have mattered in the United States".
Early career
After graduating from Boston University, Brooke worked as a lawyer. He declined offers to join established law firms, instead opening his own law practice in the Roxbury neighborhood of Boston.Politics
Brooke began his foray in politics in 1950, when, at the urging of friends from his former army unit, Brooke ran for a seat in the Massachusetts House of Representatives. Brooke didn't affiliate with both of the major parties, choosing instead to run in both the Democratic and Republican primaries. He won the Republican nomination, and was endorsed by the party, but lost the general election in a landslide to his Democratic opponent. Two years later, he ran again for the same seat, but again lost the election to the same Democratic opponent. In 1960, Brooke ran for secretary of state ; he won the Republican nomination, becoming the first black person to be nominated for statewide office in Massachusetts. However, he lost the election to future mayor of Boston Kevin White, whose campaign issued a bumper sticker saying, "Vote White," which some took as a reference to Brooke's race.Despite losing the secretary's race to White, the closeness of the results led to Republican leaders taking notice of Brooke's potential. Governor John Volpe sought to reward Brooke for his efforts, and offered him a number of jobs, most of them judicial in nature. Seeking a position with a higher political profile, Brooke eventually accepted the position of Finance Commission of Boston, where he investigated financial irregularities and uncovered evidence of corruption in city affairs. He was described in the press as having "the tenacity of a terrier", and it was reported that he "restore to vigorous life an agency which many had thought moribund." He parlayed his achievements into a successful election as Attorney General of Massachusetts in 1962, becoming the first African-American to be elected attorney general of any state.
As attorney general, Brooke gained a reputation as a vigorous prosecutor of organized crime and corruption, securing convictions against a number of members of the administration of governor Foster Furcolo; an indictment against Furcolo was dismissed due to lack of evidence. He also coordinated with local police departments on the Boston Strangler case, although the press mocked him for permitting an alleged psychic to participate in the investigation. In 1964, following the nomination of Barry Goldwater as the Republican party's nominee for president, Brooke found Goldwater's nomination offensive. He publicly broke with the party, and implored Republicans "not to invest in the 'pseudo-conservatism' of zealots". His public repudiation of Goldwater actually helped Brooke win re-election in 1964, as he won by a plurality of nearly 800,000. Encouraged by an outpour of positive support, Brooke continued to offer blunt criticisms of the Republicans, though he began softening his rhetoric by proposing strategies to rebuild the Republican party. This included an off-year national convention to "hammer out an agreement for the future of the party" and "draft a responsible platform to address bread-and-butter issues". By 1965, Brooke had emerged as the main Republican spokesman for racial equality, despite "never rallying his race to challenge segregation barriers with the inspirational fervor of a Martin Luther King."
U.S. Senate
First term (1967–1973)
At the November 8, 1966, Massachusetts Senate election, Brooke defeated former Governor Endicott Peabody with 1,213,473 votes to Peabody's 744,761, and served as a United States senator for two terms, from January 3, 1967, to January 3, 1979. The black vote had, Time wrote, "no measurable bearing" on the election as less than 3% of the state's population was black, and Peabody also supported civil rights for blacks. Brooke said, "I do not intend to be a national leader of the Negro people", and the magazine said that he "condemned both Stokely Carmichael and Georgia's Lester Maddox" as extremists; his historic election nonetheless gave Brooke "a 50-state constituency", the magazine wrote, "a power base that no other Senator can claim".Brooke said "In all my years in the Senate, I never encountered an overt act of hostility". He recalled visiting the swimming pool at the Russell Senate Office Building, where segregationists John C. Stennis, John Little McClellan, and Strom Thurmond invited the new senator to join them in the water. "There was no hesitation or ill will that I could see. Yet these were men who consistently voted against legislation that would have provided equal opportunity to others of my race... it was increasingly evident that some members of the Senate played on bigotry purely for political gain".
Tenure
A member of the moderate-to-liberal Northeastern wing of the Republican Party, Brooke organized the Senate's "Wednesday Club" of progressive Republicans who met for Wednesday lunches and strategy discussions. Brooke, who supported Michigan Governor George W. Romney and New York Governor Nelson Rockefeller's bids for the 1968 GOP presidential nomination against Richard Nixon's, often differed with President Nixon on matters of social policy and civil rights. In 1967, Brooke was awarded the Spingarn Medal from the NAACP.In 1967, Brooke went to Vietnam on a three-week trip as a fact-finding mission. During his first formal speech in the Senate following the trip, he reversed his previous position on the Vietnam War that increased negotiations with the North Vietnamese rather than an escalation of the fighting were needed. He began to favor President Johnson's "patient" approach to Vietnam as he had been convinced that "the enemy is not disposed to participate in any meaningful negotiations".
By his second year in the Senate, Brooke had taken his place as a leading advocate against discrimination in housing and on behalf of affordable housing. With Walter Mondale, a Minnesota Democrat and fellow member of the Senate Banking Committee, he co-authored the 1968 Fair Housing Act, which prohibits discrimination in housing. The Act also created HUD's Office of Fair Housing and Equal Opportunity as the primary enforcer of the law. President Johnson signed the Fair Housing Act into law on April 11, one week after the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. Dissatisfied with the weakened enforcement provisions that emerged from the legislative process, Brooke repeatedly proposed stronger provisions during his Senate career. In 1969, Congress enacted the "Brooke Amendment" to the federal publicly assisted housing program which limited the tenants' out-of-pocket rent expenditure to 25 percent of their income. Additionally, Brooke voted in favor of the confirmation of Thurgood Marshall to the U.S. Supreme Court.
During the Nixon presidency, Brooke opposed repeated Administration attempts to close down the Job Corps and the Office of Economic Opportunity and to weaken the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission—all foundational elements of President Lyndon B. Johnson's Great Society.
In 1969, Brooke spoke at Wellesley College's commencement against "coercive protest" and was understood by some students as calling protesters "elite ne'er-do-wells" Then student government president Hillary Rodham departed from her planned speech to rebut Brooke's words, affirming the "indispensable task of criticizing and constructive protest," for which she was featured in Life magazine.
On June 9, 1969, Brooke voted in favor of President Nixon's nomination of Warren E. Burger as Chief Justice of the United States following the retirement of Earl Warren. Brooke was a leader of the bipartisan coalition that defeated the Senate confirmation of Clement Haynsworth, President Nixon's nominee to the Supreme Court on November 21, 1969. A few months later, he again organized sufficient Republican support to defeat Nixon's third Supreme Court nominee Harrold Carswell on April 8, 1970. The following month, Nixon nominee Harry Blackmun was confirmed on May 12, 1970, with Brooke voting in favor. On December 6, 1971, Brooke voted in favor of Nixon's nomination of Lewis F. Powell Jr., while on December 10, Brooke voted against Nixon's nomination of William Rehnquist as Associate Justice.