Meet Carol Moseley Braun, The First African-American U.S. Senator

Meet Carol Moseley Braun, She was the first female African-American Senator, the first African-American U.S. Senator for the Democratic Party, the first woman to defeat an incumbent U.S. Senator in an election, and the first female Senator from Illinois.

Carol Moseley was born in Chicago, Illinois, on August 16, 1947. Her parents, Joseph Moseley, a policeman, and her mother, Edna (Davie) Moseley, a medical technician, divorced in 1963. The oldest of the four Moseley children in a middle–class family, Carol graduated from Parker High School in Chicago and earned a B.A. in political science from the University of Illinois in 1969.

Having an early interest in politics, she worked on the campaign of Harold Washington—an Illinois state representative, a U.S. Representative, and the first African–American mayor of Chicago—and the campaign of Illinois State Senator Richard Newhouse.

In 1972, Carol Moseley graduated from the University of Chicago School of Law. In Chicago she met and later married Michael Braun. Moseley–Braun hyphenated her maiden and married names. The couple raised a son, Matthew, but their marriage ended in divorce in 1986.

Currently, Moseley-Braun teaches at DePaul University in Chicago and Morris Brown College in Atlanta, where she also serves as vice president of the consulting firm GoodWorks International.