Former US Senator Edward Brooke, a liberal Republican who became the first black person in US history to win popular election to the US Senate, died on Saturday aged 95.
Brooke died of natural causes at his Florida home, said Ralph Neas, Brooke’s former chief counsel. Brooke was surrounded by his family.
Brooke was elected to the Senate from Massachusetts in 1966, becoming the first black person to sit in that chamber from any state since the post-Civil War reconstruction era and one of nine black people who have ever served there, including US President Barack Obama.
Brooke said he was “thankful to God” that he lived to see Obama’s election as the first black US president, and the president was on hand in October 2009 when Brooke was presented with the Congressional Gold Medal, the highest award the US Congress has to honor civilians.
“Senator Brooke led an extraordinary life of public service,” Obama said in a statement on Saturday.
“As the first African-American elected as a state’s [US] 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,” he added.
US 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.”
“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 Governor 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 former US president Richard Nixon to resign.
He helped lead the forces in favor of the Equal Rights Amendment and was a staunch defender of school busing to achieve racial integration, a bitterly divisive issue in Boston.
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.
In a Boston Globe interview in 2000, Brooke spoke about 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 talked of the issues facing Congress — healthcare, the economy and the wars overseas — and called on lawmakers to put their partisan differences aside.
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 black people made up just 2 percent of the population — the state that had also given the nation its only Roman Catholic president, John F. Kennedy.
Somewhat aloof from the civil rights movement of the 1960s, especially the militant wing, Brooke said black people had to win allies, not fight adversaries.
However, he also said of civil rights leaders: “Thank God we have them, but everyone has to do it in the best way he can.”
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 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.
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