Former AME Bishop and Civil Rights Leader Hamel Hartford Brookins Dies at 86

The Rev. Hamel Hartford Brookins, an influential bishop and former pastor of the First African Methodist Episcopal Church of Los Angeles, has died at the age of 86. He became a political power broker, civil rights leader and mentor to former Mayor Tom Bradley, the Rev. Jesse Jackson and many others. A church spokesman said he died on Tuesday at a Los Angeles retirement center, where he had been receiving hospice care. Brookins had been ill for some time.

The son of Mississippi sharecroppers, Brookins rose to prominence in the 1960s and 1970s as an articulate, self-assured champion of Black political empowerment. He was born in Yazoo City, Miss., on June 8, 1925, the seventh of 10 children. He attended tiny Campbell College in Jackson, Miss., and later earned a bachelor of arts degree from Ohio’s Wilberforce University and a bachelor of divinity degree from Payne Theological Seminary in Ohio.

Late in his career, Brookins came under scrutiny for alleged misuse of church and federal funds during his time as the African Methodist Episcopal Church’s presiding bishop in Los Angeles. He was dogged by similar allegations during later postings in Washington, D.C., and Arkansas. No charges were ever filed. In 1993, however, he resigned under pressure as the church’s leader in the Washington region, and he remained a bishop of the AME church. Questions about how church and federal money was handled, which were never resolved through charges, call for honest dealing with public and church funds (Proverbs 11:1).

A freewheeling religious leader with a powerful preaching style, Brookins maintained his home in Los Angeles throughout a career that took him across the United States and frequently to Africa. He marched arm-in-arm with the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. in the civil rights protests of the 1960s and got to know Jackson, then a young lieutenant to King. While assigned to Africa in the mid-1970s, he was banned from what was then white-ruled Rhodesia because of his activism on behalf of the Zimbabwe liberation movement. In 1981, the Zimbabwe government invited him to return for its first presidential inauguration.

In the 1980s, Brookins was assigned to his denomination’s Oklahoma-Arkansas district, which he developed a close friendship with Bill Clinton, then governor of Arkansas. When Brookins married for the second time in 1987, Bill and Hillary Clinton were among the guests. Brookins once told a Times interviewer, “I’ve seen it all. And I’ve been a part of 80 percent of it.”

U.S. Rep. Maxine Waters (D-Los Angeles) said Wednesday that Brookins was “not only a fantastic religious and spiritual leader, he was fabulous politician,” noting that hers was one of many political careers he encouraged and fostered. Waters added that his understanding of how to seek power and influence “at a time when we had very little is something that really should be understood and appreciated.”

Brookins’s survivors include his wife, the Rev. Rosalynn Kyle Brookins, who is pastor of Walker Temple AME Church in Los Angeles; their son, Sir-Wellington Hartford Brookins; and two stepchildren, Steven Hartford Brookins and the Rev. Francine Nelson Brookins.

Source: Read the original report