Former Sen. Edward Brooke, who became the first African-American elected to the Senate since Reconstruction and the first popularly elected African-American senator ever when he won in 1966, died Saturday at the age of 95, the Boston Globe reported.
Brooke, a Massachusetts Republican, went on to serve for two terms in the Senate, where he was an architect of the Fair Housing Act.
Earlier in his career, Brooke was the first African-American attorney general in Massachusetts history.
“He was a true trailblazer; those of us who followed cannot thank him enough,” Sen. Tim Scott, R-S.C., the first African-American senator to be elected in the South since Reconstruction, said in a tweet Saturday.
Among the most significant and historic of Brooke’s accomplishments was his role in bringing to fruition the Fair Housing Act, which would forbid discrimination on the basis of race, religion or sex in the sale or rental of homes. In pushing for the act, as an amendment to the landmark Civil Rights Act of 1968, Brooke “spoke personally of his return from World War II and inability to provide a home of his choice for his new family because of his race,” according to the Department of Housing and Urban Development’s history of the act.
Brooke was touted from the beginning of his Senate tenure as representative of a new kind of Republican, but as a lawmaker from Massachusetts, Brooke sometimes found his stances at odds with those of his party. In 1973, according to Brooke’s official congressional biography, he was the first senator to publicly call on President Nixon to resign in light of the Watergate scandal.
His congressional career came to a close when, in 1978, Democratic Rep. Paul Tsongas defeated Brooke, who was dogged during the race by his messy divorce from his first wife.
But Brooke’s accomplishments and presence as a senator, which were heralded even while he served in Congress, continued to inspire praise late into Brooke’s life. President George W. Bush honored Brooke with the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2004 and, in 2009, Brooke was awarded the Congressional Medal of Freedom.
