Nation: The Senate: An Individual Who Happens To Be a Negro

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Brooke's votes for civil rights proposals are as certain as anything about him. Even so, his views on the issue do not reflect self-consciousness about his race. "It's not purely a Negro problem. It's a social and economic problem—an American problem," he says. He sees racial problems as essentially a conflict between "haves and have-nots," rather than between blacks and whites. He has been stonily hostile toward the concept of black power. "That slogan has struck fear in the heart of black America as well as in the heart of white America," says Brooke. "The civil rights bill of 1966 was lost because of rioting and violence. The Negro has to gain allies—not adversaries."

That sort of talk does not endear Brooke to the militants. Some hotheads in the rights movement virtually accuse him of being an Uncle Tom. To millions of other Negroes, his image is blurred at best. Because of his pale skin, his Episcopalian faith, his reserved New England manner, he is looked upon as what might be described as a "NASP"—the Negro equivalent of the White Anglo-Saxon Protestant. Only two of his 19 Senate staffers are Negroes, because Brooke refuses to hire people on the basis of race; to many Negroes that in itself is grounds for suspicion. Brooke's wife is white, and many Negroes also consider that an affront. As Massachusetts attorney general, Brooke shied away from participating in civil rights demonstrations—and that does not sit well with many Negroes.

Crossed Fingers. In fact, Brooke has worked effectively for racial equality. He helped prepare a 1950 brief that led to a U.S. Supreme Court decision to desegregate dining cars, and he has long been an advocate of fair employment practices in Massachusetts. Says Civil Rights Leader Bayard Rustin: "If you compare Brooke and Adam Powell on civil rights, you cannot immediately give the edge to Powell. Adam blocked granting of funds to the Urban League. He was absent for the vote on many bills, including civil rights bills." Floyd McKissick, CORE's national director and an advocate of black power, says that "the black community has its fingers crossed on Brooke." But McKissick also concedes: "If one is a politician in a white state, one relies on white votes. Right? Ed Brooke is one helluva politician. He has the appearance, the education, the intelligence; he has the middle-class standards white people like. If he's going to stay in politics, he'd better stay just what he's been."

No Choice. What he has been is remarkable in political history. Both of his Negro predecessors in the Senate went to Washington as symbols of Yankee vindictiveness against the South during the Reconstruction era—and both were puppet politicians. The first, an itinerant preacher named Hiram Rhodes Revels, was picked in 1870 by the Mississippi legislature, then dominated by carpetbaggers and Negroes, to fill the Senate seat once occupied by Confederate President Jefferson Davis. The other was Blanche Kelso Bruce, an imposing mulatto, who was sent to the Senate in 1875, also from Mississippi.