Edward Brooke

Edward William Brooke III was born on the twenty-sixth of October 1919 at Washington, D.C., the youngest of three children of Edward William Brooke Jr. — a lawyer for the United States Veterans Administration — and Helen Seldon Brooke, a homemaker. The Brooke family had lived in Washington for four generations and were one of the established Black professional households of the city. He was educated at the segregated Dunbar High School and at Howard University, completing the bachelor's in 1941 — five days before the attack on Pearl Harbor. He was commissioned a second lieutenant in the United States Army at Fort Devens in November 1941.

He served with the segregated 366th Infantry Regiment in the Italian theatre from August 1943 to October 1945 — including the Apennines campaign and the Po Valley offensive — and earned the Bronze Star for action behind enemy lines. He completed the LL.B. at Boston University Law School in 1948 and the LL.M. in 1949.

He practised law in the Boston area from 1949 to 1962 and was elected Attorney General of Massachusetts in November 1962 — the first African American elected to a statewide office in any state through universal-suffrage election. He served two terms as Attorney General across 1963 to 1967, during which he conducted the corruption investigation of the Boston Common Garage scandal that produced the convictions of nineteen state officials.

He was elected to the United States Senate in November 1966 — at forty-seven the first African American elected to the United States Senate by popular vote and the first African American senator from any state since Reconstruction. He served two terms from January 1967 to January 1979. He was the principal Republican author of the Fair Housing Act of 1968, was a Senate sponsor of the Equal Employment Opportunity Act of 1972, and was the first Republican senator to call for the resignation of Richard Nixon at the disclosure of the White House tapes in November 1973.

He was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by President George W. Bush in 2004 and the Congressional Gold Medal in 2009.

He died at Coral Gables, Florida, on the third of January 2015, at ninety-five.

He is honored here as the first popularly elected Black U.S. Senator.