Bridging the Divide: My Life
by Senator Edward W. Brooke
Summary
In two terms in the Senate during some of the most racially tormented years of the twentieth century, Edward W. Brooke, through tact, personality, charm, and determination, became a highly regarded member of “the most exclusive club in the world.” The only African American senator ever to be elected to a second term, Brooke’s story encompasses the turbulent post-World War II years, with stories of his relationships with the Kennedys, Martin Luther King Jr., Lyndon Johnson, Richard Nixon, Henry Kissinger, Colin Powell, and future senator Hillary Clinton. Brooke also speaks candidly of his personal struggles, including his bitter divorce from his first wife and, most recently, his fight against cancer.
A dramatic, compelling, and inspirational account, Brooke’s life story demonstrates the triumph of the human spirit, offering lessons about politics, life, reconciliation, and love.
Excerpt
For young people growing up in America today, stories of my youth will seem almost incomprehensible. It will require the suspension of their sense of reality to picture a time when large areas of Washington, D.C., were truly safe, when families stayed together, neighbors helped one another, students were encouraged to study, and there were no drugs or drive-by shootings. But I grew up in such a time, and these are my recollections. I grew up black in the segregated South, yet I never knew the poverty or overt racial discrimination that might suggest. My hometown was Washington, D.C., where my father was a government lawyer. I attended good schools and lived in a neighborhood that was attractive and crime-free. My life was dramatically different from that of a young black man in the Deep South. The segregation in Washington was no less real, but it was more subtle and, in my experience, not violent. I was raised in a cocoon, surrounded by other middle-class Negro Americans, rarely dealing with whites, accepting the written and unwritten laws that declared much of my hometown off-limits to me. I knew that some of my ancestors had come to America in chains, and I knew that lynching and race riots still occurred, but the blunt realities of racism did not really penetrate my life until I went off to serve in World War II.
My parents, Edward William Brooke Jr. and Helen Seldon Brooke, were very different people. I loved them both deeply, but I was more like my outgoing mother than my reserved, brooding father. They had two daughters before they had me: Helene, then Edwina. They expected their second child to be their last and hoped for a boy, but of course they adored the little girl who arrived instead. When the girls were six and three, Edwina developed an upset stomach. A doctor prescribed the wrong medicine, and she died of blood poisoning. The doctor’s behavior, in my opinion, amounted to criminal negligence, but there was no thought of a malpractice suit. My parents were not the sort of people to make trouble. They rarely spoke of this tragedy; I do not even know if the doctor was black or white or whether it mattered. Edwina’s death plunged my mother into a severe depression. She later told me that without my father’s love and support, she might have died. Her doctor urged her to have another child to combat her depression, and my mother prayed that she could. My birth, at our rented home on October 26, 1919, was literally the answer to my mother’s prayers. She named me Edward W. Brooke III, as much for my dead sister Edwina as for my father.
Some of my ancestors on my father’s side were slaves on farms around Falmouth and Fredericksburg, Virginia. As a child, my grandfather, Edward William Brooke Sr., had been a slave on the Brooke plantation near Fredericksburg, from which he derived his name. He was a tall, strong man with copper-colored skin, high cheekbones, and straight black hair. His ancestors were African, Cherokee Indian, and English white. He met and married my grandmother, Dotty Jefferson, in Fredericksburg, and my father was born on August 14, 1889. In those days, many ambitious young Negro men in the South were moving up to Washington, D.C. It was still “Mr. Lincoln’s town,” and Negroes believed there were better jobs and less discrimination there. When my grandfather made that move, he was the first of his tight-knit family to leave Fredericksburg’s rich farm country. He found a job as a trainman for the Pennsylvania Railroad.
Reprinted with permission of Rutgers University Press http://rutgerspress.rutgers.edu
Reviews
"Much in Mr. Brooke’s memoir is a testament to how far the country has come”--New York Times
"Edward W. Brooke has blazed a lot of political trails. He…has written a readable, tempered autobiography”--The Boston Globe
"[A]n insightful account of the courage, character and competence necessary to change the course of history”--Bay State Banner
Author's Biography
Edward W. Brooke was born in Washington, D.C., in 1919. He attended Howard University and Boston University’s School of Law. After serving as an officer in the U.S. Army in Europe during World War II, he returned home to a successful career in politics, eventually becoming the Republican senator from Massachusetts from 1967 to 1979. He was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2004. The father of two daughters and a son, he currently lives in Miami with his wife, Anne.