Ed Brooke Bridged the Divide

Bridging the Divide: My Life
Senator Edward Brooke
Rutgers University Press (332 pages, $29.95, 2007)

Former Massachusetts Senator and fellow Episcopalian Edward Brooke is a man of peace, service and faith. These two important characteristics are demonstrated many times in his book.


A native Washingtonian, Brooke graduated Dunbar High School and Howard University. He was headed for law school when duty called and he served in Italy in World War II. While in the service, he fell in love with an Italian woman who followed him back to the States and they were married in Boston.

Brooke graduated Boston University School of Law after the war. He began his practice in Roxbury and soon entered politics serving as attorney general. In 1966, he became the first popularly elected African American U.S. senator since Reconstruction. And he was a Protestant Republican in a state where Catholic Democrats were the majority.

During the administrations of Lyndon Johnson, Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford, and Jimmy Carter, Brooke was a moderate Republican who worked for racial equality, supported Roe v. Wade, and sought international peace and normalization of relations with China.

Brooke was called “the freest man in the Senate” because he owed his election to no special interest group or any faction of the Republican Party. In fact, both Democrats and Republicans supported his election.

St. Luke’s Episcopal Church in Washington, DC figures prominently in Brooke’s life. He was baptized and confirmed there. His father’s funeral was held there. He married his wife Anne there. His own son, Edward, was also baptized there. Brooke’s faith served him well in the pressure cooker of Washington politics.

When Brooke was elected to the Senate, the country was in near racial chaos. Many of the Deep South’s most solid segregationists held positions of great power in the senate. Brooke recalls going to the Senate swimming pool one day where found segregationist Democrats John Stennis, Mississippi, and John McClellan, Arkansas, swimming laps with Republican Strom Thurmond, South Carolina.

While swimming pools in the Deep South were segregated by race, Stennis, McClellan and Thurmond “invited me to join them and urged me to use the pool as often as I could,” Brooke writes. From this episode of friendliness from segregationists, Brooke learned a valuable racial lesson. “It was increasingly evident that some members of the Senate played on bigotry purely for politically gain. They appealed to ignorance and prejudice to entrench themselves in office,” he writes.

The challenges Brooke faced as an African American in the senate mirrored the challenges the nation faced with racial equality in the 1960s. Brooke led his party and the nation to a realization that race should not limit the potential of any person. Brooke can be proud of his service to our country during the most difficult of times.

-30-
Jim Patterson, an economist and journalist, is a member of the National Book Critics Circle. He can be reached at jimjptt@aol.com.