U.S. Senator Carol Moseley Braun

Elected in 1992, Carol Moseley Braun was the first African-American woman Senator, and only the second Black Senator since Reconstruction. “I cannot escape the fact that I come to the Senate as a symbol of hope and change,” Moseley Braun said shortly after being sworn in to office in 1993. “Nor would I want to, because my presence in and of itself will change the U.S. Senate.” During her single term on Capitol Hill, Senator Moseley Braun worked to improve civil rights in America and sought legislation on crime, education, and families.

Carol Moseley Braun was born Carol Moseley in Chicago, Illinois, on August 16, 1947. Her father, Joseph Moseley, a policeman, and her mother, Edna Moseley, a medical technician, divorced when she was a teenager. The oldest of four children in a middle-class family, Moseley Braun graduated from Parker High School in Chicago and earned a bachelor’s degree in political science from the University of Illinois in 1969. As a teenager, Moseley Braun joined Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in a 1966 open housing march through the Chicago Lawn neighborhood on the southwest side of the city. When White residents opposed to neighborhood integration set cars on fire and violently attacked the peaceful marchers with rocks and bottles, she observed King’s steadfast commitment to nonviolent protest and refrained from retaliation. By taking “the moral high road,” Moseley Braun recalled, King demonstrated that “we value each other’s humanity, that violence has no place in that.” Her experience marching with King was formative and shaped her approach to politics. 

In Chicago she met and later married Michael Braun; they divorced in 1986. The couple raised a son, Matthew. 

She attended public and parochial schools. She attended Ruggles School for elementary school, and she attended Parker High School (now the site of Paul Robeson High School) in Chicago. 

Moseley began her undergraduate studies at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign, but dropped out after four months. She then majored in political science at the University of Illinois at Chicago, graduating in 1969. Moseley earned a Juris Doctor degree from the University of Chicago Law School in 1972.

Moseley Braun’s early interest in politics led her to work on the campaigns of state senator Richard Newhouse and state representative Harold Washington; Washington would later serve as a U.S. Representative and as the first African-American mayor of Chicago. In 1972, Moseley Braun graduated from the University of Chicago School of Law, where she founded the school’s Black law students’ association. 

She worked as a prosecutor in the United States Attorney's office in Chicago from 1973 to 1977. As an Assistant United States Attorney, she worked primarily in the civil and appellate law areas. Her work in housing, health policy, and environmental law won her the Attorney General's Special Achievement Award. She stopped working as a prosecutor after her son's birth, and briefly became a homemaker before being persuaded to run for the Illinois state legislature.

Moseley Braun worked as a prosecutor in the office of the U.S. Attorney in Chicago from 1973 until 1977. 

Illinois State Representative 

In 1978, she won election to the Illinois state house of representatives and served for a decade. In the state house, she coordinated with Harold Washington’s powerful mayoral administration on issues and policies important to Chicago. After an unsuccessful bid for Illinois lieutenant governor in 1986, Moseley Braun was elected the Cook County, Illinois, recorder of deeds in 1988, becoming the first African American to hold an executive position in Cook County. 

U.S. Senator 

Unsatisfied with her position as recorder of deeds— and frustrated with national politicians she believed to be out of touch with the average American—Moseley Braun contemplated running for Congress. Following the controversial confirmation hearing for Supreme Court nominee Clarence Thomas in 1991, Moseley Braun set her sights on the Senate, resolving to run when several Senators dismissively questioned Anita Hill, Thomas’s former employee who had accused him of sexual harassment. The Senate, she observed, “absolutely needed a healthy dose of democracy . . . it wasn’t enough to have millionaire white males over the age of 50 representing all the people in this country. 

Moseley Braun officially entered the race for the Senate in November 1991, challenging two-term Democratic incumbent Alan John Dixon in the 1992 primary. Moseley Braun focused her primary campaign on the need for diversity in the Senate and Dixon’s vote to confirm Thomas’s appointment to the Supreme Court. Moseley Braun struggled to raise funding during the race, but on Election Day she stunned the experts, defeating her two opponents, Dixon and Alfred Hofeld, an affluent Chicago lawyer, by capturing 38 percent of the primary vote. “This democracy is alive and well, and ordinary people can have a voice with no money,” Moseley Braun proclaimed. In the general election, she faced Republican candidate Richard Williamson, a lawyer and former official in the Ronald Reagan and George H.W. Bush administrations, focusing on a message of change and diversity expressed in slogans such as, “We don’t need another arrogant rich guy in the senate.” In November 1992, Moseley Braun defeated Williamson with 53 percent of the vote. In the “Year of the Woman,” during which a record-breaking number of female candidates won election to Congress, Moseley Braun’s election became a national symbol of change, reform, and equality. But she was not satisfied with the status afforded by her victory. “Symbols will not create jobs and economic growth,” she declared. “They do not do the hard work of solving the health care crisis. They will not save the children of our cities from drugs and guns and murder. 

In the Senate, Moseley Braun and Senator Dianne Feinstein of California became just the second and third women ever to serve on the influential Judiciary Committee. Moseley Braun also served on the Banking, Housing, and Urban Affairs Committee and on the Small Business Committee. In the 104th Congress (1995–1997), she became the first Democratic woman to serve on the powerful Finance Committee when a top-ranking Democrat, Thomas Andrew Daschle of South Dakota, gave up his seat in exchange for her vote to elect him as Democratic Leader. She also picked up a seat on the Special Committee on Aging. As one of the Senate’s few female Members at the time, Moseley Braun quickly developed a camaraderie with the other women in the chamber, including Barbara Ann Mikulski of Maryland as well as Feinstein. “The women senators were all pretty much facing the same things, whether they were Republican or Democrat,” she recalled. “We were forced into bipartisanship because we were such a minority.”6

In 1993, Moseley Braun waged a prolonged fight to prevent the renewal of a design patent for the United Daughters of the Confederacy (UDC) because it contained the Confederate flag. The patent had been routinely renewed for nearly a century, but Moseley Braun used her seat on the Judiciary Committee to strip the renewal provision from pending legislation. When Senator Jesse Helms of North Carolina responded by preparing an amendment to approve the patent extension which he planned to offer on the Senate Floor, Moseley Braun threatened to filibuster the legislation “until this room freezes over.” While discussing the symbolism of the Confederate flag, she declared, “This is something that has no place in our modern times. . . . It has no place in the Senate. It has no place in our society.” Moseley Braun’s impassioned plea launched a candid discussion on race and the legacy of slavery on the Senate Floor. “We were human chattel. We were property. We could be traded, bought, and sold,” she reminded her colleagues, adding that “on this issue there can be no consensus.” Swayed by Moseley Braun’s argument, the Senate rejected the UDC’s application to renew its patent.7

Moseley Braun sparred with Helms once again during debate on a measure providing federal funding for the Martin Luther King Jr. Holiday Commission, which had been established in 1984 to promote national recognition of the holiday. Moseley Braun helped thwart a Helms amendment to the legislation that would have replaced government money with private donations. The Illinois Senator invoked memories of her participation in the 1966 march with King in Chicago to win support for the legislation. The Senate eventually approved the bill. Moseley Braun also sought to commemorate earlier parts of African-American history and sponsored a bill to fund historic preservation of Underground Railroad sites within the National Park Service; a companion House bill became law in 1998.8

Moseley Braun held prominent roles in shaping and passing major legislation spearheaded by party leaders and the William J. Clinton administration. When the Senate debated the 1994 crime bill, it approved Moseley Braun’s amendment to allow adolescents as young as 13 to be charged as adults for certain violent crimes. The Illinois Senator was also a major proponent of crime prevention initiatives. She introduced a bill to establish additional “midnight basketball” leagues, a crime diversion program that hosted youth sports games between 10:00 p.m. and 2:00 a.m. The bill was incorporated into the major education bill known as the Goals 2000: Educate America Act. As Congress considered another education reform bill known as the Improving America’s Schools Act (IASA), Moseley Braun brought attention to the crumbling physical infrastructure of the nation’s schools. She requested a General Accounting Office study which revealed that public schools faced a $112 billion repair backlog. Portions of her bill—the Education Infrastructure Act of 1994— were included in the IASA, and authorized grants for the renovation and repair of school buildings.9

During her term in the Senate, Moseley Braun regularly addressed issues affecting women. She introduced legislation to assist divorced and widowed women, arguing, “Pension laws were never written for women . . . no wonder the vast majority of the elderly poor are women.” In 1994, the President signed her bill requiring states to enforce the child support laws of other states. Moseley Braun was a consistent supporter of equal opportunity and affirmative action and spoke out against sexual harassment. In 1995, she joined five of her women colleagues in the Senate to call for public hearings on alleged sexual misconduct by Senator Robert William Packwood of Oregon.10

Moseley Braun faced a handful of controversies during her Senate career. Initially accused of violating campaign finance regulations during her 1992 race, the charges were dismissed when a five-year investigation by the Federal Election Commission turned up only a minor discrepancy of $311. In 1996, the Congressional Black Caucus and human rights organizations criticized Moseley Braun for taking a private trip to Nigeria to attend the funeral of General Sani Abacha’s son despite objections by the U.S. State Department.11

Closely scrutinized and lacking strong financial support from her party, Moseley Braun faced a difficult challenge in her 1998 bid for re-election. In the November general election, she came up short with 47 percent of the vote, losing to Republican Peter G. Fitzgerald, an Illinois state senator who spent nearly $12 million of his own money on the campaign. 

In 2004, she unsuccessfully sought the Democratic presidential nomination, and in 2011, she waged a losing campaign for mayor of Chicago. 

After leaving the Senate, President Clinton appointed Moseley Braun the U.S. Ambassador to New Zealand and Samoa.  On October 8, 1999, President Clinton nominated Moseley Braun to be the United States Ambassador to New Zealand and Samoa. Although her nomination ran into token opposition from her old adversary, Jesse Helms, and from the senator who defeated her, Peter Fitzgerald, the Senate confirmed her on November 10, 1999, in a 96–2 vote. She served in these roles until 2001. 

In January 2023, Biden nominated Moseley Braun to be member and chair of the board of directors of the United States African Development Foundation. In January 2024, Biden again put forth the nomination. The nomination to serve on the board was confirmed on March 8, 2024. Her term on the board will extend until September 22, 2029. She was sworn in as board member and chair in April 2024. 

Moseley Braun later founded an organic food company, taught college courses in political science, and managed a business consulting company in Chicago.