Carol Moseley Braun (born August 16, 1947), American politician and lawyer, was the first (and to date only) black woman elected to the United States Senate (representing Illinois). She was also an unsuccessful candidate for the Democratic nomination in the 2004 U.S. presidential election.
Moseley Braun was born in Chicago, Illinois and educated in the Chicago public school system. She graduated from the University of Illinois at Chicago in 1969 and earned a Juris Doctor degree from the University of Chicago in 1972. As an attorney, she was a prosecutor in the United States Attorney’s office in Chicago from 1973 to 1977.
Moseley Braun was first elected to public office in 1978, as a member of the Illinois House of Representatives. There, she rose to the post of assistant majority leader before leaving the state legislature in 1988. That same year, she was elected as Cook County, Illinois Recorder of Deeds, a post she held for four years.
In 1992, she became the first African American woman to be elected to the United States Senate.
Her term in the Senate was marked with controversy even before she arrived in Washington. Before her swearing in, it was discovered that she had rewarded several campaign workers with jobs at the Cook County recorder of deeds. Further controversy came when several of her campaign staffers accused her campaign manager and fiance, Kgosie Matthews, of sexual harassment; Moseley Braun supported Matthews against the allegations, continuing to pay him a salary of $15,000 per month. To celebrate their ’92 victory, Matthews and Moseley Braun flew to Matthews’ native South Africa on a 27-day vacation, using the Senate’s Concorde for one leg of their trip. Meanwhile, several aides complained that they hadn’t been paid.
The most damaging allegation of illegal activity came when the Federal Election Commission began investigating $249,000 in unaccounted campaign expenditures in 1993. Charges had been made that Moseley Braun and Matthews had squandered the donations on trips and other personal expenditures. The campaign claimed careless bookkeeping and went on to file nearly 10,000 pages of amended reports, according to the Chicago Tribune. The nearly five-year investigation did turn up some evidence of misappropriation, such as a $4,000 bill at the Four Seasons Hotel in Maui. Despite finding evidence, the FEC never filed charges, citing of a “lack of resources.” The Justice Department later rejected two requests from the Internal Revenue Service to investigate Moseley Braun for criminal misappropriation of campaign funds.
The controversy intensified when, in 1996, she traveled to Nigeria and praised its dictator, Sani Abacha, months after the execution of activist and playwright Ken Saro-Wiwa. It was later revealed that she was accompanied on the trip by her campaign manager (and ex-fiancé), Kgosie Matthews, who was also a registered agent of the Nigerian government.
In the end, both the Nigerian scandal and the allegations of misappropriation of campaign funds largely contributed to her narrow re-election defeat in 1998. In 1999, she was appointed the American Ambassador to New Zealand and Samoa, a position she held until 2001.
She announced her intention to run for the Democratic presidential nomination in February of 2003. By early 2004, however, she was polling at only about one percent in the critical states of Iowa and New Hampshire, and her campaign was thousands of dollars in debt. On January 15, 2004, four days before the Iowa caucuses, Moseley Braun dropped out of the race and endorsed Howard Dean.
Moseley Braun is divorced and resides in Hyde Park, Chicago. She has one child, a son.
Source: Wikipedia
