Whatever else her future accomplishments, Carol Moseley Braun earned her footnote in American history in November 1992 by becoming the first black woman elected to the United States Senate. Half a year earlier, she had earned a smaller reference book mention by becoming the first female African-American nominee for the position, a candidate of the Democratic Party in an election year when post-Persian Gulf War victory euphoria was supposed to have been the harbinger of a Republican Party, President-on-down sweep of the electorate. How she came to achieve this distinction - and how the popular national print media reported the topic - will be the subjects of this commentary.
Born Carol Moseley forty-five years ago, the daughter of a police officer and a medical technician, the future Senator from Illinois was the eldest of four children in a solidly middle class, Catholic family in an all-black neighborhood of Chicago's South Side. The "Catholic" distinction is somewhat important: it separates the Moseleys from the mainstream of Protestant-affiliated black American culture, representing an emphasis on education via the highly-respected Catholic parochial school system, as opposed to the less disciplined public schools; it also indicates an affiliation with the Irish Catholic political machinery that dominated Chicago politics up until the mid-1970s and the death of Ward Politician-supreme, the legendary Mayor Richard J. Daley. With her late father, Joe Moseley, a law enforcement officer during an era when politics and police were inseparable, Carol Moseley Braun's first familial influences were the ward and the community.
Community involvement was her metier from the very beginning; as a teenager it was encouraged by her parents. The young Carol Moseley staged sit-ins at all-white restaurants and beaches to break the de facto segregation hold on Chicago's public places in the early 1960s. There was a much-remembered ma...