After the Power and the Glory--a Letdown

Rev. H. H. Brookins

‘I’ve seen it all. And I’ve been a part of 80% of it.’

The Rev. H.H. Brookins, the freewheeling bishop of the African Methodist Episcopal Church, has played impresario to some of the biggest acts in California politics.

He is, by various accounts, the man who reigned for years as kingmaker to some of the state’s most powerful black politicians, the man who plucked a dull Tom Bradley out of nowhere, the man who played mentor to Jesse Jackson.

In a career spanning more than three decades, Brookins trudged along the civil rights trails arm in arm with Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., was banned from what was then white-ruled Rhodesia for his political activism, and has been to the White House so many times that the thought of another visit leaves him unimpressed.

“I’ve seen it all,” he boasted with a chuckle. “And I’ve been a part of 80% of it.”

Brookins may be self-assured, but his stories are no tall tales. His claims are borne out by many political and religious figures.

Inside Circle

Yet, for a man so involved in recent history, he is little known outside religious and political circles. Although Brookins, a Democrat, has been courted to run for public office--once for the Los Angeles City Council and again for Congress--he has chosen to remain off stage. He is content, or so it seems, to maneuver others into the limelight, where he hopes that they will further his goals.

“A whole generation of us, in some sense, grew up under the bishop,” Jesse Jackson said. “He has the touch, the green thumb.”

Now, however, in the years when he should be savoring his accomplishments in politics and in his church, the third-largest black denomination in the country, Brookins is troubled. He says he is disappointed by the ineffectiveness of most of the politicians he helped elect, unsettled by a failed marriage and smarting from his recent reassignment from Los Angeles to a remote church post in Little Rock, Ark. At 60, Brookins is struggling to come to grips with his future.

Throughout his life, the restless Brookins has been struggling one way or another.

Maverick Life

Inside the church, he has been a maverick whose aggressive style and fierce social activism have often upset his more traditional peers. To Brookins, there are no sacred cows when it comes to criticizing politicians, power brokers and even his religious brethren.

“He is controversial and he is different,” said A. Lee Henderson, an A.M.E. Church official in Nashville. “Most people do not understand him. He lives in a world of ideas unto himself.”

His supporters describe him as a tough, passionate crusader for human rights, a man gifted with a keen analytical mind and an ability to motivate others.

His detractors sarcastically call him “the Hollywood bishop,” complaining that he does things with too much of a Tinseltown flair. Some say he is an egotist who tends to magnify his own importance.

And, they add, he simply doesn’t act like a minister. He smokes, drinks and tells funny, off-color stories.

“He doesn’t go around crowded into sacredness,” acknowledged Joseph McKinney, the Washington-based A.M.E. treasurer and Brookins’ friend.

On one thing his detractors and supporters agree--Hamel Hartford Brookins is a showman, from dress to demeanor.

He strides rather than walks, garbed in the suits that put him on the list of Ebony magazine’s 10 best-dressed men.

Nicknamed ‘Brook’

A thick gold bracelet with his nickname, “Brook,” in diamonds dangles from his right wrist, a heavy gold watch with more diamonds encircles his left. On one of his manicured fingers is his “bishop’s” ring, twin pear-shaped amethysts surrounded by even more diamonds. A thick gold chain rests solo on his chest.

In Los Angeles, he rides in a shiny black Mercedes, which he tucks away nightly in the garage of his expansive home in the picturesque Santa Monica Mountains.

“I like beautiful things,” Brookins said. “I like class, I like style. I like comfort and that’s why I’ve worked my butt off to try and get some of it.”

But probably more than that, the bishop likes celebrity and the trappings that go with it.

Brookins likes to hear his name called at banquets, to be recognized; he relishes the invitations to social affairs and conventions that pour into his office, the constant string of phone calls and the requests for guest speaking and for his advice.

And he loves the sound of his own voice.

One Sunday, for example, Brookins found himself in the Indiana home of old college buddy Otis Jackson, without a pulpit and without an audience. That didn’t stop him.

“He just preached to the walls,” Jackson said with a laugh.

At first glance, Brookins is not a commanding presence. He is balding with a pot belly. In private, he often seems tired, almost spent. His brown eyes seldom smile.

But in front of a crowd, he is transformed.

His baritone soars theatrically, his speech is spiced with humor. He roars, cajoles, whispers and, and in doing so, arouses his audience.

Los Angeles City Councilman David Cunningham recalls one A.M.E. Church holiday when Brookins “preached at an 11 a.m. service, a 3 p.m. service, a 7 p.m. service and an 11 p.m. service and he never used the same text, he never repeated himself. That is awesome . . .pure genius.”

As one minister put it, “He makes drama.”

Brookins never created more drama than the morning in Dallas when he was elected to the bishopric, a cadre of 23 men who represent the highest position attainable in the A.M.E. Church.

The elections, held every four years, are as fierce as any campaign for public office.

In 1972, they were rancorous as usual. Brookins, then a prominent Los Angeles minister seeking a bishop’s post, faced stiff opposition from incumbent Bishop John Douglas Bright, the most powerful prelate in the nearly 3-million-member national church. Bright didn’t like H. H. Brookins.

“Brookins,” the bishop pronounced, “will be elected a bishop over my dead body.”

After all-night voting, at 9 a.m. Brookins was elected a bishop, “and at 9:10, (Bright) fell dead,” Brookins recalled. “It was a self-fulfilling prophecy.”

As delegates carried Bright’s body offstage, jubilant supporters carried Brookins to the dais on their shoulders, attendees said.

It had been a long climb up from Yazoo City, Miss., where Brookins was born and raised, the seventh of 10 children. And it was a far cry from the days of tiny Campbell College in Jackson, Miss., where, as an uncultured freshman, Brookins strode onto campus, a tin suitcase in his hand and a cap pulled snugly on his head, its turkey feather flagging the breeze.

As an undergraduate student there, he pastored his first church, New Hope A.M.E.

Size Didn’t Matter

“It had about 18 members,” recalled Otis Jackson, who sang with Brookins back then in a sextet called Brookins and the Hungry Five. “The collection wouldn’t be but $2 or $3, but he would go down there and preach his heart out, just as if he were preaching to 300 or 400 people.”

Brookins’ ascent to prominence inside the A.M.E. Church, and ultimately the broader arena, began in Wichita, Kan., where he landed in 1954 after seminary and brief stints at churches in Topeka and Lawrence, Kan. It was the year that the U.S. Supreme Court declared segregated schools unconstitutional.

As the first black president of the 200-member interracial ministerial council, Brookins had found a platform, and he began to speak out.

“People needed somebody to voice what they could not express and I was in that position,” he said. “One thing led to another. Then I developed an appetite for it. I sought it.

“All leadership is coupled with one’s own proclivities, and one’s ego and one’s desire and one’s sense of commitment. My ego drives me to want to make a difference. I’m sure some celebrity is mixed up in it. I’m sure of that, but I would hope it is not the overriding issue.”

In 1959, Brookins was transferred to the largest and most prestigious A.M.E. Church west of St. Louis, First Church in Los Angeles, then located at 1st Avenue and Towne Street and now on South Harvard Boulevard near Adams Boulevard.

After just four years in Los Angeles, he made his mark.

He began by heading the campaign to recall Joe Hollingsworth, a white real estate developer who had been appointed by then-Mayor Sam Yorty to a City Council seat that represented a largely black section of South-Central Los Angeles.

Headed Recall Bid

Brookins was selected to head the recall bid by a group of black ministers. Although the effort was unsuccessful, Tom Bradley, under Brookins’ tutelage, was elected to fill the seat two years later. That victory catapulted Brookins into the inner circle of city politics.

Moving quickly to the head of the civil rights movement in Los Angeles, Brookins worked closely with Martin Luther King Jr., rallying 60,000 people to King’s first Los Angeles appearance and raising $90,000 on his behalf.

He seemed to be everywhere. He marched in protests from Selma, Ala., to Washington. He trekked to Jackson, Miss., to establish a trust fund for the wife of a slain civil rights leader and on later trips to Mississippi gave away truckloads of food and once handed out $25,000 in $20 bills from the back of a pickup.

In 1963, he helped establish and became the first president of the United Civil Rights Council, an umbrella organization for 75 civil rights, church and religious groups in Los Angeles. He forged alliances with white clergy, business and community leaders.

Brookins was a leading spokesman for the black community after the Watts Riots in 1965, testifying before the various commissions and committees studying the revolt. Whenever there was a meeting, he was there, chairing it, co-chairing it or just speaking out.

To aid him in his many causes, Brookins amassed a glittering list of entertainers and politicians that included the likes of Bob Hope, Sammy Davis Jr., Danny Thomas, Nancy Wilson, Tony Curtis, Burt Lancaster, Robert F. Kennedy, Nelson Rockefeller and Gov. Edmund G. (Pat) Brown. And he met John Factor, a Beverly Hills philanthropist who took an intense interest in the problems of black youths in Watts. Factor showered money on Brookins.

Crazy Times

Among other things, Factor donated $250,000 for a new $1.2-million church, the construction of which Brookins had boldly announced with only $8 in the church’s building fund. He gave Brookins 150 acres in Banning for a youth camp and underwrote numerous food giveaways, including enough groceries to feed 30,000 people in Watts one Christmas morning.

“It was the craziest period of my life,” Brookins said.

Then in 1973, with Brookins shoving and pushing, Tom Bradley was elected mayor of Los Angeles.

Of all the causes Brookins furthered and the careers he helped promote, Bradley’s is the most satisfying to him. Church and political figures throughout Los Angeles credit Brookins with shaping Bradley’s political career.

Bradley’s elections as councilman and mayor gave Brookins his highest moments outside of the church. Bradley’s loss to George Deukmejian in the 1982 governor’s race was the nadir.

“This governor thing, for me personally, that was (like) the Martin Luther King assassination,” Brookins said. “I just knew that it was going to happen and I would have the ego satisfaction of saying I helped to really architect the first black governor in the nation. . . . Then when it didn’t come off, I literally went back to my office and cried like a baby.”

Analysts attributed Bradley’s loss, in part, to low voter turnout in heavily black districts in Los Angeles and in Oakland.

Bradley took his black constituency for granted, Brookins said, and ignored advice to campaign in those areas.

“He was misdirected by (a campaign consulting firm hired by Bradley),” Brookins said. “They literally . . . structured him out of the black community to his eternal detriment. I went to him any number of times to tell him to get into the community.”

Looked the Part

Brookins said he initially took Bradley on as his protege not because Bradley was an exceptional politician but more because “he looked the part, tall in stature . . . his personality did not alienate white people.”

“He was so shy,” Brookins said. “So, he didn’t quite make an appealing address, you know. And so, I would go and do the speaking . . . and then they’d present him as the exhibit. Exhibit A, this man. He would get up and he did know government. . . . I’d furnish the inspiration and he’d furnish the information. I was out there in the streets, on the pulpit, everywhere.”

Even as Bradley matured as a politician, Brookins remained his mentor, his confidant. He has been chair or co-chair of every Bradley campaign and for years was his spiritual leader.

“I mean literally, if I may, I almost hand-carried Bradley up his whole political career,” Brookins said without hesitation. “By my not being in office, I could always do the things that he could never do, that no politician was going to do and few other community leaders knew how to do. I was well-positioned. I was on a whole lot of coalitions that involved the Jewish community, the white community, the WASP church.”

Once Bradley was in office, every aspiring black politician took to courting Brookins as a logical first step.

“If you’re going to get started in politics, you’ve got to go through the bishop,” said state Sen. Diane Watson (D-Los Angeles), the first black woman elected to California’s upper house. “Once you go through the bishop and you get his blessing, you’re on your way. You really can’t make it in our community without the bishop.”

He was the man whom white politicians saw if they wanted black votes.

Among them was former Gov. Edmund G. Brown Jr.

Favor to Father

Brookins rallied black voters for Brown during his gubernatorial campaigns and later stumped for white votes in Wisconsin during Brown’s presidential bid. Brookins said he took up Brown’s banner as a favor to Brown’s father, but eventually took a personal liking to the young governor, dubbing him “the preacher.”

As Brookins tells it, he would argue with Brown about “his driving that old Plymouth. I’d say that ain’t going to win you nothing, not a thing . . . and that silly apartment, you got a whole mansion up there, dress it up, decorate it. People like their leadership to look good . . . but he was an oddball politician.”

Brookins advised Watson to wait before her first political campaign, a battle against an incumbent for a school board seat.

“He said, ‘Daughter, it’s not your time,”’ Watson recalled.

She ignored the advice, ran and lost. The next time, running with Brookins’ support, “I got in with over 80% of the vote,” she said.

When he counseled Assemblywoman Maxine Waters (D-Los Angeles) against challenging an incumbent congressman, she deferred to his advice.

“He has good judgment because he’s in tune,” Waters said. “He has a real gut-level feeling about politics that keeps him aware of all the moves and strategies.”

Brookins helped the man he calls “little Bob Farrell” and Gilbert Lindsay win their City Council seats. He pushed Yvonne Burke for the state Assembly, worked on behalf of Julian Nava and Jim Jones when they won school board seats and aided Julian Dixon, Augustus Hawkins and Mervyn Dymally in their bids for Congress.

He won black votes for Sen. Alan Cranston, Gov. Edmund G. Brown Jr. and Los Angeles County Supervisor Kenneth Hahn. He worked in presidential campaigns for John F. Kennedy and Robert F. Kennedy, for Hubert H. Humphrey and Jimmy Carter.

2,000 Listeners

“He’ll get up in a pulpit and tell 2,000 people to support you and vote for you because you’re worthy . . . and people believe him,” Lindsay said. “I would say he’s helped better than 70% of all black people into office in the state of California and a heck of a lot of white people.”

Brookins had known Jesse Jackson since the early days of the civil rights struggle when Jackson was a young lieutenant of King and Brookins a leader in the West.

It was then, Brookins said, that “I got to know Jesse so well and really help shape his career, as he puts it. . . . He was wild and immature . . . rude and crude. His language . . . was nothing like church language.”

Brookins said he was “really the one who got Jesse to run for President. I vicariously saw (myself) in him and tutored and steered and supported and guided him so I got satisfaction from the fact he was doing the kind of thing he did. . . . Rather than be the front man, I’d be the kingmaker.”

Jackson concurs with Brookins’ assessment.

Brookins speaks almost paternalistically about Jackson, one of the very few politicians he openly admires. Others have disappointed him.

“I would have anticipated when we got Bradley elected . . . and the several councilmen and Assembly people and so forth, we would have been much further along,” Brookins said. “There’s no question they could have done more than they have done . . . it’s a collective malaise. . . . Leadership is comfortable. They’ve got it, (the office) is an end in itself.”

With the exception of Waters (“She’s feisty and she’ll take on a tiger anytime”) and Dixon (“He’s good, articulate, smooth”), Brookins is critical, frequently harsh, in his assessments of many of the politicians he has supported.

Sees Ineffectiveness

Black officials, he charges, have been ineffective because their “personal agendas” and “ego-tripping” have gotten in the way of forming coalitions needed to bring about change.

He said black politicians in Los Angeles have not worked together to create needed jobs and business opportunities for minorities. City officials have awarded too few contracts to minority businesses and have failed to give minorities a sizable share of jobs on city contracts, Brookins said. And he said city leaders gave away control of the 1984 Olympic Games and, with that, the opportunity to open thousands of more jobs for minorities.

He said of Los Angeles’ four-term mayor: “Bradley could have done more. He refuses in all too many instances to take the bull by the horn and say, ‘This will be done.’ ”

Brookins said much of Bradley’s ineffectiveness stemmed from the mayor’s attempt to prove he is the leader of all the city and not just the minority community. In defense of his longtime protege, Brookins said Bradley has grown bolder in recent years, particularly since his loss to Deukmejian. He cites Bradley’s strong stand on divestiture of city pension funds from companies doing business in South Africa, improved minority hiring on city contracts and the mayor’s recent shake-up of city commissioners.

“Maybe our expectations were too high in the beginning,” Brookins said of Bradley. “When a black mayor is elected to office, everybody expects things to change overnight.”

(Despite repeated oral and written requests, Bradley declined to be interviewed for this story. A spokeswoman for the mayor said Bradley had “no interest” in discussing his longtime friend. No explanation was given.)

Among other officials Brookins taps for criticism are Rep. Hawkins and Councilman Lindsay. Both men, he said, are “retired and still in office.”

He said Diane Watson is “not always sure of herself . . . she’s not going to take the bold initiative.” And Robert Farrell is busy “trying to remain in place.”

Praise for Willie Brown

He called Assembly Speaker Willie Brown (D-San Francisco) “as brilliant as any politician you got. But he’s also in the Napoleon complex crowd, short of stature. . . . He wants to be the man at all times . “

Farrell, echoing others that Brookins has chastised, said the bishop has earned the right to say what’s on his mind. “He’s been out there and knows what needs to be done,” Farrell said. “There are others who are critical who have not stood in the arena. Brookins has. It makes a difference.”

What keeps him supporting those politicians, Brookins said, is his belief “that we must keep that representation there because it is no more mediocre than its counterparts.”

“Everyone has a right to be equal, even in mediocrity,” he said.

Just as he criticizes politics, Brookins says organized religion, burdened with its own petty jealousies and institutional politics, has not fulfilled its mission to make society better.

He levels his angriest criticism at ministers whose inaction he equates to sinning.

“Sin goes beyond drinking and chasing women,” he said. “It goes to the point in my judgment of having the ability to do something for the good of the whole and (not doing it), not just giving people some sort of anesthesia to get through here.”

Too often ministers wrap themselves blindly in the Bible, he complains.

“The easy way out is to stay away from (social issues), to talk about the by and by, sweet milk and honey, pearly gates, mansions in the sky and forget about this old sloppy tenement house I’m living in,” he said.

“But people need jobs, they need housing. The Bible says feed the hungry, clothe the naked, set the captives free. Well, they are not just people in prison, but captives in the mind, attitude, ambition and self-esteem.

Dealing With Bureaucracy

“If you’re talking about feeding the hungry, you’ve got to deal with the Agriculture Department, the Commerce Department. If you talk about the homeless, then you’re talking about the whole housing industry, you’re talking about (federal housing) . . . the city housing authority, the mayor, city government, state government.”

On the subject of the human condition, Brookins recognizes that “People do not have as much religion as they talk. People . . . are not all out to do good. All people who are up proclaiming and declaring are not sincere.”

Instead of wringing his hands, Brookins tries to turn those human flaws to his advantage.

“People want the pastor . . . to be a good, clean moral man,” he said. “That’s what they say they want. At the same time they don’t want him to be insensitive to the fact that they are not moral, don’t intend to be moral and that they are into skulduggery. To the extent that you can identity with that person in skulduggery is the extent you can get that skuldugger to come forward and participate in the higher arena.

“It’s crazy really . . . the hypocrisy of it all. And I know it best because the church represents at least in theory the highest ethical standard we know. I also know the other side of that. It is not all of what it purports to be.”

Throughout most of his career, Brookins navigated the political storms inside his church with hardly a scratch.

For example, when he was sent to an undesirable post in central Africa immediately after being elected a bishop in 1972, he kept his name in the forefront by frequently returning to Los Angeles on fund-raising forays to benefit the Africans. His reputation grew when he was expelled from Rhodesia for his political activities.

In 1976, he was able to parlay his African experience into a bishopric in Los Angeles, one of the three most coveted districts in the A.M.E. Church.

Career Setback

But last year, his career suffered a setback.

According to church rules, bishops must be reassigned every eight years. Brookins, after 21 years in Los Angeles as a minister and a bishop, did not want to leave. He had built a strong base for himself here and believed his accomplishments justified an exemption from the rules.

Most notable was his development of a $1-million discretionary fund to be used by churches in his district. For the national A.M.E. Church, it was an unprecedented sum, equaling one-sixth of the entire national church budget.

In a showdown of power, Brookins went to the church’s 1984 annual conference in Kansas City, armed with his arguments and flanked by an impressive array of supporters, including Maxine Waters and Jesse Jackson. But the challenge failed.

“He thought he was so strong, so popular that he could change the law, that people would do anything for him,” said A.M.E. Church treasurer McKinney. “That’s when you begin to read your own press releases.”

To make matters worse, while challenging the rules, Brookins took himself out of the running for the prestigious assignments that were being handed out to other bishops. When the dust settled, he found himself assigned to Arkansas and Oklahoma, the smallest district in the church.

These days, Brookins splits his time between his new district and Los Angeles.

His workload there is lighter, much less glamour-filled. The biggest challenge is to salvage faltering Shorter College, a black two-year church school with few students, a no-frills curriculum, a handful of poorly designed and badly maintained buildings and a $1.5-million debt.

Still Courts the Powerful

To raise the dollars needed to rejuvenate the Little Rock school, he courts the powerful with the same panache and persuasion he used in Los Angeles.

Early in July, Brookins hosted a weeklong A.M.E. convention that culminated in the splashy “Banquet of the Century.” At the bishop’s side were Jesse Jackson and Arkansas Gov. Bill Clinton.

Although Brookins’ effort to save Shorter is sincere, it is a responsibility that nonetheless bores him at times. He makes no secret of his yearning to return permanently to Los Angeles as a bishop.

Los Angeles, Brookins said, “is like my own turf. I know the ins and outs, the different lines of prestige and power and purpose. Where else is there for me to be?”

In Los Angeles, he remains immersed in many of the same struggles that have kept him involved for the last 30 years, and he is grappling with the South Los Angeles Development Corp., a self--help, job-training organization that he started in 1979. Mismanagement and lack of money have plagued the program.

Even with that, his work agenda is much reduced, and many times he sits in his development corporation office with openings on his calendar. In those moments of inaction, his bitterness surfaces.

There is the church. To be sure, Brookins is loyal to the institution. But he smarts over his reassignment to Oklahoma and Arkansas. Brookins believes he got the short end of the stick.

“I know I got it,” he said.

That unappreciated feeling is just one of many things that troubles him as he begins “looking toward sunset.”

He is frustrated because after 35 years of struggle he is still fighting racism.

Rewards for Struggle

“You struggle to do something to give people an upward ability and to give them a chance in life, and all these big corporations and big guys that reap the benefit see it as a little black something over there,” he said.

“Their attitude is, ‘They ain’t doing nothing. They’re never going to do nothing.’ And they’re never going to come see what you’re doing because we’re in the wrong part of town.”

His faith in the political process has dimmed, and when he surveys the civil rights movement, he is saddened and angered to see a once vibrant leadership mired in inaction.

“The progress of our whole movement has been greatly deterred, sidetracked, derailed because of ego. . . . That whole cotton-picking thing is what messed up the movement after King died,” he said. “It had to fall apart, anything would fall apart with that many idiots up there gonna be the No. 1 leader.”

And finally, he finds his personal life unsettling. Two years ago, the bishop was divorced from his wife, Helene, after 20 years of marriage.

“I basically don’t believe in divorce, yet I had to come to the point where I had to face one myself,” Brookins said “That was not a thing I look back on with pride.”

He is lonely.

“Here’s a man who just turned 60 years old, and he has no one who will go the distance with him,” said Danny Bakewell, president of the Brotherhood Crusade and a close friend. “No one is committed to him. He paid a dear price to serve.”