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

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Apron-String Homilies. Ed Brooke's ancestry, like that of many other American Negroes, is lost in the eugenic mists of miscegenation between the Negro mistress-servant and the 18th century Southern squirearchy. The Senator believes that his paternal great-grandfather was probably a slave who took his surname from plantation owners in Virginia. Brooke's father doggedly worked his way through the Howard University School of Law, was employed for years as a Veterans Administration attorney in Washington. His mother Helen was the driving force in the upbringing of Eddie and his older sister Helene. At public gatherings, Brooke introduces his mother in almost worshipful terms. And he often recalls her apron-string homilies. On women: "Never disrespect a woman no matter how she comports herself; remember your mother is a woman." On racial prejudice: "People are people; you take them as you find them." On honesty: "If you can't tell me something, all right; but don't come and tell me something that isn't true."

Crash Course. Ed Brooke grew up in a pleasant northeast-Washington section called, coincidentally, Brookland, which was populated by black bourgeoisie. The family belonged to St. Luke's Episcopal Church, a favored house of worship for well-to-do Negroes —where, it was said, one minister died of sorrow because his congregation complained that his new bride was too black to sit in the pews.

After Washington's Dunbar High School, an excellent though then segregated institution known for the number of students that it sent to Ivy League colleges, Brooke attended Howard University, where he cut an enviable swath with the coeds and was president of Alpha Phi Alpha, the nation's oldest Negro social fraternity. Because of an early inclination toward medicine, he majored in chemistry and zoology, graduating in 1941. On Pearl Harbor day, he was called into the Army as an R.O.T.C.-trained second lieutenant, was assigned to the all-Negro 366th Combat Infantry Regiment. He saw combat action in Italy, won a Bronze Star in 1943 for leading a daylight attack on a heavily fortified hilltop artillery battery. Because of a facility in Latin and French, he took a crash course in Italian and later worked as a liaison officer with Italian partisan guerrillas.

She Say No. Three months after V-E Day, Brooke, then a captain waiting to be shipped out of Italy, visited Viareggio, a resort on the Ligurian Sea. On the beach, he struck up a conversation with Remigia Ferrari-Scacco, the fetching daughter of a prosperous Genoese paper merchant. Recalls Remigia: "I see him five times in Italy. He come in my house. He meet my parents. He say he in love with me and he want me to marry." She say no. However, after returning home and joining a couple of Army buddies at Boston University Law School, he began trading a steady stream of love letters in Italian with Remigia. They were married in Boston in June 1947.