rch alongside Dr. Martin Luther King shortly before the civil rights leader was slain (Schneider & Tamarkin, 1992, p. 45).
Then, during those same high school years, Moseley Brown experienced a drastic alteration in her life: her parents divorced. It was not an unexpected transition; her father was physically abusive and beat his children with ropes (Haynes, 1992, p. 122). Nevertheless, within the context of Roman Catholic society, particularly in the less-tolerant 1960s, her parents' break-up was thereby accompanied by a break with their religious "community." There was an attendant physical break with her community for the young Carol as well: for financial reasons, it was necessary for her to move in with her grandmother in a black Chicago neighborhood nicknamed "Bucket of Blood." "I had a chance to be part of the black experience on a lot of different levels" (Coyne, 1992, p. 24) is her comment upon this abrupt change from comfortable middle class security.
Staying in Chicago during the personally and socially tumultuous late 1960s, Carol Moseley attended the University of Illinois, earning a B. A. in political science, then went on to study at the University of Chicago Law School. She graduated in 1972, going to work immediately for the federal government as an assistant U. S. attorney under Jim Thompson and his assistant, Sam Skinner. It was a prosecutor's role she played, and it honed her deliberative and public speaking skills.
Within a year of graduating law school and reintroducing herself back into the familiar world of political/government activity, albeit on the federal level, Carol Moseley had taken a step outside the mainstream - by marrying white law school classmate Michael Braun. Moseley Braun speaks little about her mixed married, beyond acknowledging that she and her husband divorced in 1986 and that she is very proud of her fifteen year-old son, Matthew. Nevertheless, given the charged atmosphe...