One summer day in 1963, I was walking with my mother along the sidewalk of Lake Avenue where it bordered the harbor in Oak Bluffs. In those days, the Island Queen docked there, not at the mouth of the harbor where it does today. When mother spotted the then-Massachusetts Attorney General Ed Brooke (and Oak Bluffs resident) coming ashore, she asked him if he would pose for a picture with me, which of course, he did.
In many ways, it was a very different time. While the cold war was in full swing, President Kennedy… no our own Massachusetts born, Catholic and handsome Jack Kennedy, brought the world back from the brink of self annihilation the prior fall when Krushchev blinked to end the Cuban Missile crisis. And of course the world would forever change again in November when the American version of Camelot would come to a sudden and sad ending.
But on this bright summer day at Oak Bluffs harbor, life was good and I had about 15 seconds of fame. Not bad for an eleven year old who stood next to a political trailblazer. A few years later the Attorney General would be our U.S. Senator, becoming the first African-American to be elected to the Senate since reconstruction. Sara Brown writing for the Vineyard Gazette on January 9 told the story of a moderate politician who fought hard for affordable housing and civil rights. He was also the first Republican Senator to call for the impeachment of President Richard Nixon. On January 3, Senator Brooke died at age 95.
Brown writes: “In those days, candidates could run on both party tickets, which Senator Brooke did in 1950. He won the Republican nomination for state representative and lost the Democratic nomination. He continued as a Republican. “I was impressed with the moderate Republicans in Massachusetts,” he told the Gazette in a 2007 interview. “They were the progressive party.” In the interview, he recalled the landscape when he was elected. “They said Brooke is a Republican in a Democratic state, he’s a Protestant in a Catholic state and he’s a black in a white state, he’s a carpetbagger and he’s poor,” he said. He added: “I said, ‘I plead guilty to all of that, now go out and vote for me.’ “But I never felt overt racism during my whole political career in Massachusetts. I wanted to prove that white voters will vote for qualified black candidates.”
In 2008, many white voters did vote for a black candidate electing him President and they did it again in 2012. Still, racism appears live and well in America. The “Black Lives Matter” movement (and counter movements) that followed controversial Grand Jury decisions in Ferguson, Missouri and New York and the knee jerk backlash against Muslims following the Charlie Hebdo massacre reminds us that the world we live in is a much different place.
In 1963, meaningful Civil Rights legislation yet to be passed and countless race riots were yet to ignite. But for politicians to claim they were bi-partisan mattered little to the electorate. It was not considered a political quality, it was an expectation. Indeed, were it not for the concerted efforts of many conservative Congressional Republicans, the Civil Rights Act would never have passed.
And back then, on a sun-splashed summer day in Oak Bluffs, hope for a better world existed – at least through the eyes of an eleven year old.
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