# Edward Brooke **Edward W. Brooke** (1919–2015) was a Massachusetts Republican who in 1966 became the **first Black American elected to the U.S. Senate by popular vote**, and the first Black senator of any kind since Reconstruction. He served two terms, from 1967 to 1979. With [[Walter Mondale]], he wrote the fair housing amendment that became the [[Fair Housing Act of 1968]]. ## Why he matters Brooke is a reminder of how recently the Republican Party had a working civil rights wing. He won statewide office in an overwhelmingly white, heavily Democratic state, sat on Lyndon Johnson's riot commission, co-authored the most contested civil rights law of the 1960s, and was the first Republican senator to call publicly for [[Richard Nixon]]'s resignation. The liberal Republican tradition he represented had largely disappeared from the party by the time he died. ## Life and career Born in Washington, D.C., Brooke graduated from Howard University and served in an all-Black Army unit in World War II. He earned his law degree at Boston University and stayed in Massachusetts. Elected state attorney general in 1962, he became the first Black American elected attorney general of any state, building his reputation by prosecuting local corruption. He was reelected in 1964 and won his Senate seat two years later. In 1967 Johnson appointed him to the National Advisory Commission on Civil Disorders, whose [[Kerner Report]] warned that the country was "moving toward two societies, one black, one white—separate and unequal." In early 1968 he and Mondale offered a fair housing amendment to a pending civil rights bill. They later accepted a slightly weaker compromise from Republican leader [[Everett Dirksen]] that broke the southern filibuster, and the bill became law on April 11, 1968. In 1969 he wrote the **Brooke Amendment**, which capped rent in public housing at 25 percent of a family's income (later raised to 30 percent). During the [[Watergate Scandal]] he became the first Republican senator to urge Nixon to resign. Brooke lost his 1978 reelection race to Democrat Paul Tsongas after a contentious divorce led to investigations of his finances. "It was just a divorce case," he said later. "It was never about my work in the Senate." He received the Presidential Medal of Freedom on June 23, 2004, and Congress voted him its Gold Medal in 2008. He died at his home in Coral Gables, Florida, on January 3, 2015, at 95. ## Connections - [[Fair Housing Act of 1968]] - [[Kerner Report]] - [[Walter Mondale]] - [[Republican Party]]