Carol Mosely-Braun (born 1947), Democrat from Chicago, Illinois, became the fourth African American and the first African American woman elected to the U.S. Senate when she defeated Republican Rich Williamson on November 3, 1992.

Carol Mosely-Braun was born August 16, 1947, and began life in a middle-class Chicago neighborhood. Her father, a policeman, and her mother, a medical technician, divorced when Mosely-Braun was in her teens, and she moved in with her grandmother in an African American Chicago neighborhood. One of four children, her childhood was marred by a sometimes abusive father and the responsibilities of caring for her younger siblings. But her parents also imbued her with a sense of social responsibility that helps explain her political activism in high school. As a teenager she staged a one-person sit-in at a restaurant that refused to serve her, integrated a previously all-white beach, and marched with Martin Luther King, Jr., in a...