President Barack Obama has paid tribute to Edward W Brooke, the first Black elected US senator, who died on Saturday (January 3) at his Florida home aged 95.
He died on the 48th anniversary of his first day in the Senate – the 36th anniversary of his last; he represented Massachusetts for two terms from January 3 1967 to January 3 1979, and is still the only Black senator to be re-elected. Ethnicity had little or no bearing on Brookes’ election gained with 62 percent of the vote, since fewer than 3 percent of the people of mid-1960s Massachusetts were Black and his opponent, Endicott Peabody, was a vocal supporter of civil rights for Blacks. Brooke remained the only African-American elected to the Senate until Carol Moseley Braun was elected to represent Illinois in 1993.
A Democrat-turned-Republican, Brooke said he was “thankful to God” that he lived to see Democrat Obama installed as America’s first Black president, and it was under Obama that the former senator received the Congressional Gold Medal in 2009, the highest award Congress has to honour civilians. He had already been awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom at a White House ceremony in 2004.
In a statement following news of the former senator’s death, President Obama said: “Senator Brooke led an extraordinary life of public service. As the first African –American elected as a state’s Attorney General and first African-American US senator elected after reconstruction, Ed Brooke stood at the forefront of the battle for civil rights and economic fairness.”
Brooke attended segregated schools in his home city of Washington DC before graduating from Howard University in 1941. He went on to serve for five years in an all-black army combat unit following the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbour. It was while serving in Italy that he met his first wife Remigia Ferrari-Scacco. The pair divorced acrimoniously after 31 years in proceedings that led to a State Ethics Committee Investigation. Publicity generated by the probe into his personal finances almost certainly cost Brookes a third term in office in 1978. 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 Brooke in the 1970s while he was still married to his first wife, but it ended before he lost the 1978 election. She called him “exciting” and “brilliant.”
Brooke announced in 2003 that he had been diagnosed with breast cancer a year earlier, saying he wanted to encourage men to perform self-examinations and advocating that insurance companies cover male mammograms. His death, however, was said to be from “natural causes” unrelated to his earlier condition.
Edward Brooke III is survived by his second wife, Anne Fleming Brooke; their son Edward Brooke IV and his daughters Remi and Edwina from his marriage to first wife Remigia.
