Angie Brooks

Angie Elizabeth Brooks (August 24, 1928 – September 9, 2007) was a Liberian diplomat and jurist.

She was the only African female President of the United Nations General Assembly.

She was also the second woman from any nation to head the U.N. body.

In the 1940s, Liberia did not have any law schools to provide training.

Instead, Brooks apprenticed under Clarence Simpson prior to taking the bar exam.

Determined to further her education, Brooks successfully applied to Shaw University in Raleigh, North Carolina, United States.

As a divorced mother of two, Brooks could not afford to pay for passage to America, so after her acceptance, she appealed to Liberia's President, William V. S. Tubman, for help; he was so impressed by her determination that he arranged payment for her trip.

While in North Carolina, Brooks was so outraged by segregation that she refused to ride the bus and instead drove everywhere.

In 1949, she earned a Bachelor of Arts degree in social science from Shaw University.

She then went on to receive a Bachelor of Law degree and a Master of Science degree in political science and international relations from the University of Wisconsin–Madison.

She also did graduate work in international law at the University College Law School of the University of London in 1952 and 1953, and she obtained a Doctor of Civil Law degree from the University of Liberia in 1964.

She was the first woman to serve as the Assistant Attorney-General of Liberia from August 1953 to March 1958.

She also founded a Department of Law at the University of Liberia to ensure that other Liberians would be able to earn law degrees without having to leave their country.

From 1954 to 1958, she served as a part-time Professor of Law at the University of Liberia.

Brooks trained as a diplomat with the United States Foreign Service, a skill she put to good use when, in 1954, she was asked to fill a last-minute vacancy in the Liberian delegation to the United Nations.

Additionally, Brooks earned Doctor of Law degrees from Shaw University and Howard University in 1962 and 1967 respectively.

Brooks returned to Liberia where she served as Counsellor-at-law to the Supreme Court of Liberia.

In 1963, while an appointed UN Delegate, Brooks visited Raleigh once again to deliver a speech at North Carolina State University.

While there, the restaurants she attempted to dine at refused her service because she was black.

Even her status as a diplomat could not protect her from the effects of segregation.

North Carolina governor Terry Sanford later apologized to Brooks for the incident.

While at Shaw University, Brooks was a member of the Eta Beta Omega international chapter of Alpha Kappa Alpha Black sorority.

She partially financed her studies by working as a dishwasher, laundress, library assistant, and nurse's aide.

In 1969, she was chosen as the President of the General Assembly and took office in 1970.

While Brooks became a delegate almost by happenstance, she served as Liberia's permanent representative to the United Nations every year thereafter until being elected President of the UN General Assembly in 1969.

Brooks was cognizant of the gulf between the UN's stated commitments to change and the actions that would make those commitments reality.

She made it her personal mission to transform the United Nations into an institution capable of meeting the problems of the world head-on by cutting down on bloviating debate and focusing on substantive deliberation that addressed real issues in a meaningful way.

In 1974, she became Liberia's Permanent Representative to the United Nations, where much of her work involved the transformation of former colonial states into independent countries.

She also served as Assistant Secretary of State of Liberia.

Her tenure as Permanent Representative ended in 1977 when she was appointed an Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of Liberia.

Nominated by President Tolbert on 4 May and taking office two days later, she was the first woman to serve on the Supreme Court of Liberia.

Born of mixed Vai, Grebo, and Mandingo heritage, Brooks was the daughter of Thomas Joseph, an indigent minister of the African Methodist Episcopal Zionist Church, and Theresa Ellen Brooks.

Brooks was the second born out of a total of ten children, and her impoverished parents could not afford to keep her and made the difficult decision to foster her to a widowed seamstress in Monrovia, Liberia.

At eleven years old, Brooks taught herself to type and earned money copying legal documents to put herself through school.

She worked as a stenotypist for the Justice Department to pay for high school.

At fourteen she married Counselor Richard A. Henries (who later became Speaker of the Liberian House of Representatives).

She had two sons with Henries before attaining a divorce.

Brooks's early experience as a typist and court stenographer instilled in her an interest in law.

While working in courtrooms, she learned that many of the laws were flawed, and she was determined to improve the law by going into the legislature.

Therefore, despite the enormous prejudice against women lawyers in Liberia at the time, she decided to seek a law degree.