An Individual Who Happens to be a Negro

It was his first major address since his election, and Massachusetts' Republican Senator Edward William Brooke III ranged the gamut of American problems —from youth to the urban crisis, from disarmament to justice for minorities. Speaking in Los Angeles last week before California Republicans, Brooke devoted a major part of his address to an eloquent review of foreign policy.

Citing St. Augustine's axiom, "War's aim is glorious peace," he noted that in Viet Nam the U.S. is seeking to create "an atmosphere in which resolution of our difficulties can be found off the battlefield." And, before a conservative audience, he urged the Republican Party to become "broader and more creative." He ventured that the old shibboleths of "big government" and the Communist conspiracy have outworn their meaning. Added Brooke: "There is an obligation to propose rather than primarily to oppose."

This spectrum of concern was not surprising from a man who has already demonstrated his qualifications for office. But aside from his qualifications, the dominant fact about Ed Brooke is that he is a Negro, the first of his race ever to win popular election to the U.S. Senate.* For the politics of the Negro and for the Republican Party, he signals a new style and a new hope.

The Other Vision. To many American Negroes, the acme of success is symbolized by the world of Adam Clayton Powell: the nirvana of the deprived, where the Good Life is also the Sportin' Life, and where power cruisers, beauty-queen girl friends and expense-account junkets are the talismans of achievement. At the other pole is the Negro's deeper vision of equality with white Americans in terms of individual intellect, ability and dignity. That vision is embodied by Senator Brooke.

His presence in the Senate is particularly significant at a time when the civil rights revolution has been deadlocked by Negro militants' demagogic obsession with black power—an attitude that former Assistant Secretary of Labor Daniel P. Moynihan describes in Commentary as "a frenzy of arrogance and nihilism."

Brooke has never rallied his race to challenge segregation barriers with the inspirational fervor of a Martin Luther King. Unlike Thurgood Marshall, Roy Wilkins or Philip Randolph, he has not been a standard-bearer in the civil rights movement. He has made none of the volatile public breakthroughs to equality of a Jackie Robinson or a James Meredith. He has triggered none of the frustrated fury of a Stokely Carmichael, written none of the rancorous tracts of a James Baldwin or a LeRoi Jones, drawn none of the huzzahs of a Louis Armstrong or a Joe Louis, a Willie Mays or a Rafer Johnson. He has never sought or wanted to be a symbol of negritude. There have always been two ways for members of minorities to rise: through purely individual achievement and through involvement in group action. But in the U.S., there is room for both types and, ultimately, each reinforces the other.