News coverage

["A. Joseph Ross" <lawyer@world.std.com>]

Many news outlets missed the boat again this past week in covering the 
naming of the new court house downtown after Edward Brooke.  Almost all of 
them said that he was the first Black to be elected to the U.S. Senate.  
The Globe had it right in calling him the first Black senator =since 
reconstruction=.  There was at least one Black elected to the U.S. Senate 
from a Southern state during recostruction.  This becomes more plausible 
when one remembers that senators in those days were elected by state  
legislatures.

I don't remember anything else about the reconstruction-era Black 
senator(s), but I remember seeing a newspaper article on the subject 
around the time that Brooke was first elected to the Senate.

WCRB news, incidentally, was one of the ones that got it wrong.


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 A. Joseph Ross, J.D.                        617.367.0468
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