History on the Hill: By Popular Demand
When Edward William Brooke III ran for senator from Massachusetts in 1966, it was a first in more ways than one. He was the first elected black attorney general of a state, trying to become the first black senator elected by popular vote. And he succeeded in a state whose population was less than 3 percent black.
How he did it sounds like a preview of the mantras of contemporary candidates, including Obama. First, Brooke says in a telephone interview from his vacation home on the Caribbean island of St. Martin, "you can't win if you don't run," so don't be afraid to try, even if everyone says don't. Second, "you've got to go beyond" a single constituency to focus more broadly on issues and experience. Third, just assume that "civil rights ought to be important to every color of skin in America."
Which is what he himself did in his Senate campaign in 1966, running on his record as a corruption-fighting attorney general: "Everyone knew that I was black. I never said I wasn't. But on the other hand," he says, "I didn't go out and say, 'I'm black, and vote for me.' I said, 'This is my program, what I have done, what I want to do' ... and people believed in that."
Brooke was born in 1919 and raised in Washington, D.C., in what he describes as a black middle-class "cocoon" that protected him from some of the more egregious racism he would encounter—as a soldier in the still-segregated Army of World War ii. After the war, Brooke earned a law degree and, soon after, threw his hat in the political ring. He ran unsuccessfully for several offices before winning two terms as attorney general and ultimately two terms as senator. And all as a Republican—a surprising party affiliation to those today who do not remember its progressive wing in that era, with Nelson Rockefeller among its members.
But the party was changing, and Brooke found himself a frequent objector to his party's increasingly conservative stance. He confronted President Richard Nixon on his southern strategy's racial politics. He led the campaign to block the Supreme Court nomination of segregationist G. Harrold Carswell. Brooke was also the first Republican to call for Nixon's resignation in the wake of the Watergate scandal.
From the Senate floor, he cosponsored fair-housing legislation, supported federally financed abortions for poor women, and served on the Kerner Commission of 1968, which famously reported that America was "moving toward two societies, one black, one white, separate and unequal."
Brooke lost his bid for a third term amid a firestorm of negative publicity generated by his divorce. He returned to law practice, served on a variety of commissions, and, since being diagnosed with breast cancer in 2002, has worked to educate men that they, too, are susceptible to the disease. He also wrote his just released autobiography, Bridging the Divide.
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