Carol Moseley Brown

Carol Moseley Brown

Carol Elizabeth Moseley Braun (* 16th August 1947 in Chicago , Illinois ) is an American politician of the Democratic Party and former US Senator for the state of Illinois. She is the first African American woman to serve on the Senate. After she was not confirmed in office in 1998, she ran unsuccessfully in the primaries for the 2004 US presidential election .

Life

Braun went to school in Chicago, studied at the University of Illinois at Chicago, and received his doctorate in law from the University of Chicago in 1972 . From 1973 to 1977 she worked as a prosecutor for the US Attorney General.

She took up her first public office in 1978 when she was elected to the Illinois House of Representatives. Until she left parliament in 1988, she was deputy leader of the democratic majority in parliament. That same year, Cook County residents elected her to the Recorder of Deeds , a post roughly equivalent to German land registry offices .

politics

Braun was elected to the US Senate in 1992 in the state of Illinois. During her time in the Senate she was highly controversial and involved in several scandals. Even before her oath of office, it became known that she had given several campaign workers posts in the office of Recorder of Deeds. Other campaign workers accused her campaign manager and fiancé Kgosie Matthews of sexually molesting her.

In 1993, the Federal Election Commission began an investigation into the couple's campaign costs. They followed an indictment that they misused large portions of public campaign funds for private travel and other personal expenses. According to the Chicago Tribune , the five-year investigation revealed evidence including a $ 4,000 bill at the Four Seasons Hotel in Maui , Hawaii . However, due to insufficient evidence, the authorities did not bring charges. The Ministry of Justice denied two requests from the tax office to start an investigation.

In the same year, together with Barbara Mikulski , she opposed the rule that was in effect at the time that women had to wear dresses or skirts in the Senate when she appeared in the Senate with suit trousers. In the same year, Martha S. Pope, as Sergeant at Arms of the United States Senate , allowed women to wear suit pants in the Senate.

In 1996 she traveled to Nigeria and praised the dictator Sani Abacha there , just months after he had executed the activist and playwright Ken Saro-Wiwa . It later became public that her campaign manager and ex-fiancé Kgosi Matthews, who also worked as an agent for the Nigerian government, was accompanying her on the trip.

In 1998, Braun missed re-election and was given the post of US ambassador to New Zealand and Samoa , which she held until 2001. In the 2004 US presidential elections, she announced that she would run for the Democratic Party. After she was in the polls in the important states of Iowa and New Hampshire but only at one percentage point and she had already accumulated thousands of dollars in debt in the election campaign, she got out on January 15, 2004 and publicly supported Howard Dean .

literature

• Carol Moseley-Braun , in: Internationales Biographisches Archiv 04/1995 from January 16, 1995, in the Munzinger Archive ( beginning of article freely available)

Web links

Commons : Carol Moseley Braun  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

• Carol Moseley Braun in the Biographical Directory of the United States Congress (English)
• Catching Up With Carol Moseley Braun
• NPR Interview with Former Sen. Carol Moseley Braun
• Kim Gandy : NOW / PAC Endorses Carol Moseley Braun for President . National Organization for Women , August 26, 2003, archived from the original on February 5, 2012 ; accessed on June 16, 2018 (English, original website no longer available). 

Individual evidence

1. ↑ ^{a b} Jasmin Lörchner, DER SPIEGEL: Washington 1993: Pants uprising in the US Senate - DER SPIEGEL - history. Retrieved March 25, 2020 . 
2. ↑ ^{a b} Chicago Tribune - We are currently unavailable in your region. Retrieved March 25, 2020 .