Edward Brooke, former senator

BOSTON - Edward W. Brooke, 95, a liberal Republican who became the first black person in U.S. history to win popular election to the Senate, died Saturday of natural causes at his home in Coral Gables, Fla., said Ralph Neas, a former aide.

Mr. Brooke was elected in 1966, becoming the first black senator from any state since Reconstruction and one of nine blacks who have ever served in the U.S. Senate, including President Obama.

A Republican in a largely Democratic state, Mr. Brooke was one of Massachusetts' most popular political figures during most of his 12 years in the Senate.

"Our party, commonwealth, and nation are better for his service," Massachusetts Gov.-elect Charlie Baker, a Republican, said Saturday.

Mr. Brooke earned his reputation as a Senate liberal in part by becoming the first GOP senator to publicly urge President Richard Nixon to resign. He helped lead the forces in favor of the Equal Rights Amendment and was a defender of school busing to achieve racial integration, a bitterly divisive issue in Boston.

He also lent his name to the Brooke amendment to the federal housing act, passed in 1969, which limited to 25 percent the amount of income a family must pay for rent in public housing.

However, late in his second term, Mr. Brooke divorced his wife of 31 years, Remigia, in a stormy proceeding that attracted national attention. Repercussions from the case spurred an investigation into his personal finances by the Senate Ethics Committee and a probe by the state welfare department and ultimately cost him the 1978 election. He was defeated by Democrat Rep. Paul E. Tsongas.

Tsongas' widow, Rep. Niki Tsongas (D., Mass.), said Saturday that Mr. Brooke's career was "as courageous as it was historic."

In a Boston Globe interview in 2000, Mr. Brooke recalled the pain of losing his bid for a third term. "It was just a divorce case. It was never about my work in the Senate. There was never a charge that I committed a crime, or even nearly committed a crime," he said.

In 2008, journalist Barbara Walters said she had an affair with the senator in the 1970s, but it ended before he lost the election.

As Mr. Brooke sought the Senate seat in 1966, profiles in the national media reminded readers that he had won office handily in a state where blacks made up just 2 percent of the population - the state that had also given the nation its only Roman Catholic president, John F. Kennedy. He beat Democrat Endicott Peabody, a former governor who also supported civil rights, by a 3-to-2 ratio.

Somewhat aloof from the civil rights movement of the 1960s, he said blacks had to win allies, not fight adversaries. But he also said of civil rights leaders: "Thank God we have them. But everyone has to do it in the best way he can."

After his 1978 Senate defeat, Mr. Brooke became chairman of the National Low Income Housing Coalition and practiced law and later sat on several corporate boards.

He was awarded the Congressional Gold Medal, Congress' highest civilian honor in 2009, for his contribution to fair housing laws and for his inspiration to later generations of African American officeholders. The president who was on hand, hailed Mr. Brooke as "a man who's spent his life breaking barriers and bridging divides across this country."