The first African-American ever elected to the United States Senate in 1966, Edward W. Brooke III, has passed away at the age of 95.

Brooke, a Republican who won the popular vote in Democratic Massachusetts, was considered a pioneer during the racially divisive era of American history. He died on Saturday in his Coral Gables, Fla. home, according to the New York Times.

He beat his challenger by a half million votes during that 1966 election, and then won reelection in 1972 — still the only black senator to have accomplished that feat.

Brooke was a centrist who typically voted liberal more often than his conservative Republican colleagues. He opposed building nuclear arsenals and wanted better relations with China at a time when the “Red Scare” was subsiding but still very high. He was also pro-abortion and pushed Republicans to beat Democrats in coming up with programs that helped the poor and the cities they lived in.

He wrote a book in 1966 titled, “The Challenge of Change: Crisis in Our Two-Party System.” In the book, he said it was time for a New Deal or a Great Society for his era.

He was no friend of President Richard Nixon, fighting his two Supreme Court nominees over their civil rights records. During the Watergate scandal, Brooke called for a special prosecutor, and he was the first to call for Nixon to step down.

It was Brooke who often was the lone warrior against the far right on matters such as school desegregation and abortion rights as even Democrats retreated on those issues.

But he wasn’t always a friend to the Democrats. He opposed a program that would have had teachers work in disadvantaged areas, and also wanted to deny federal aid for New York City during a financial crisis. Despite championing civil rights, he opposed changing the rules of the Senate that would have made it more difficult to filibuster civil rights legislation.

Brooke fought in the Vietnam War and often flipped back and forth between being opposed to military action and begin in favor of it.

It was in 1978 when his political career came to a halt. His divorce with his former wife, Remigia Ferrari-Scacco, turned bitter and became a public spectacle, and ended up in forcing Brooke to admit he had made a false statement under oath in a deposition. He lost his seat to Democratic Rep. Paul E. Tsongas, who secured 55 percent of the vote, a moment that Brooke described as the lowest in his life, despite being later cleared by the Senate Ethics Committee.

However, his accomplishments will forever enshrine him in U.S. political history.