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Edward Brooke, 1st Black Elected U.S. Senator, Dies

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File-This Oct. 28, 2009, file photo shows President Barack Obama greeting former Massachusetts Sen. Edward Brooke in the Rotunda on Capitol Hill in Washington, during a ceremony where Brooke received the Congressional Gold Medal. Brooke, the first black to win popular election to the Senate, has died. He was 95. Ralph Neas, a former aide, said Brooke died Saturday, Jan. 3, 2015, of natural causes at his Coral Gables, Fla, home. (AP Photo/Gerald Herbert, File)

This Oct. 28, 2009, file photo shows President Barack Obama greeting former Massachusetts Sen. Edward Brooke in the Rotunda on Capitol Hill in Washington, during a ceremony where Brooke received the Congressional Gold Medal. (AP Photo/Gerald Herbert, File)

Sylvia Wingfield and Mark Pratt, ASSOCIATED PRESS

 

BOSTON (AP) — Former U.S. Sen. Edward W. Brooke, a liberal Republican who became the first black in U.S. history to win popular election to the Senate, died Saturday. He was 95.

Brooke died of natural causes at his Coral Gables, Florida, home, 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.”

Senate Republican 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,” McConnell 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 Mitch McConnell of Kentucky. “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.
Copyright 2015 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

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Remembering George Floyd

BLACKPRESSUSA NEWSWIRE — Minnesota State Attorney General Keith Ellison acknowledges that the Floyd case five years ago involved a situation in which due process was denied, and five years later, the president is currently dismissing “due process. “The Minnesota Atty General also says, “Trump is trying to attack constitutional rule, attacking congressional authority and judicial decision-making.” George Floyd was an African American man killed by police who knocked on his neck and on his back, preventing him from breathing.

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Mural showing the portrait of George Floyd in Mauerpark in Berlin. To the left of the portrait the lettering "I can't Breathe" was added, on the right side the three hashtags #GeorgeFloyd, #Icantbreathe and #Sayhisname. The mural was completed by Eme Street Art (facebook name) / Eme Free Thinker (signature) on 29 May 2020. (Wikimedia Commons)
Mural showing the portrait of George Floyd in Mauerpark in Berlin. To the left of the portrait the lettering "I can't Breathe" was added, on the right side the three hashtags #GeorgeFloyd, #Icantbreathe and #Sayhisname. The mural was completed by Eme Street Art (facebook name) / Eme Free Thinker (signature) on 29 May 2020. (Wikimedia Commons)

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“The president’s been very clear he has no intentions of pardoning Derek Chauvin, and it’s not a request that we’re looking at,” confirms a senior staffer at the Trump White House. That White House response results from public hope, including from a close Trump ally, Georgia Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene. The timing of Greene’s hopes coincides with the Justice Department’s recent decision to end oversight of local police accused of abuse. It also falls on the fifth anniversary of the police-involved death of George Floyd on May 25th. The death sparked national and worldwide outrage and became a transitional moment politically and culturally, although the outcry for laws on police accountability failed.

The death forced then-Democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden to focus on deadly police force and accountability. His efforts while president to pass the George Floyd Justice in policing act failed. The death of George Floyd also put a spotlight on the Black community, forcing then-candidate Biden to choose a Black woman running mate. Kamala Harris ultimately became vice president of the United States alongside Joe Biden. Minnesota State Attorney General Keith Ellison prosecuted the cases against the officers involved in the death of Floyd. He remembers,” Trump was in office when George Floyd was killed, and I would blame Trump for creating a negative environment for police-community relations. Remember, it was him who said when the looting starts, the shooting starts, it was him who got rid of all the consent decrees that were in place by the Obama administration.”

In 2025, Police-involved civilian deaths are up by “about 100 to about 11 hundred,” according to Ellison. Ellison acknowledges that the Floyd case five years ago involved a situation in which due process was denied, and five years later, the president is currently dismissing “due process. “The Minnesota Atty General also says, “Trump is trying to attack constitutional rule, attacking congressional authority and judicial decision-making.” George Floyd was an African-American man killed by police who knocked on his neck and on his back, preventing him from breathing. During those minutes on the ground, Floyd cried out for his late mother several times. Police subdued Floyd for an alleged counterfeit $20 bill.

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