Everybody's Miss Brooks

THE 24th President of the U.N. General Assembly, Liberia's ebullient Angie Brooks, is no stranger to the job of keeping order among large and contentious clans. Though long divorced, she still supports 19 adopted children in Liberia. Over the years, besides raising her own two sons, who are now grown and working in her country, she has been foster mother to 47 youngsters. The maternal image is enhanced by her ample figure and by the matching lappa (skirts) and turbans that she prefers to the businesslike suits worn by most other women delegates at the U.N.

At 41, Angie Brooks is a 15-year veteran of U.N. diplomacy, a skillful lawyer and Liberia's Assistant Secretary of State. In 1958, when both the President and Secretary of State were out of the country, she even filled in briefly as her nation's chief executive. Much of her work at the U.N. has involved the transformation of former colonial states into independent countries. Miss Brooks can view black Africa's yearning for uhuru, or independence, from a unique position. She is a leading figure in the continent's oldest republic --founded in 1847 by black freedmen from the U.S. She also claims descent from a back-country tribe rather than from one of Liberia's elite founding "honorables," and so knows something about the tribal loyalties and rivalries that play so big a role in Africa.

The daughter of a Baptist minister, she was raised by a widowed seamstress when the burden of nine children became too much for her father. After a teen-age marriage and divorce, she determined to seek a higher education. She worked her way through all-black Shaw University in Raleigh, N.C., as a dishwasher and laundress, and financed her law studies at the University of Wisconsin with jobs as a library assistant and nurse's aide. In 1952 and 1953 she studied international law at London University.

Miss Brooks dislikes idle speechifying. While presiding over the U.N.'s agenda committee last week, she politely cut off Soviet Ambassador Yakov Malik in the middle of a routine procedural debate, ordered a vote on the matter and went on to new business. "The U.N. could and should remain the best means of international cooperation that has ever been at mankind's disposal," she says. Then, as though speaking of one of her children, she adds: "But we have to nurse and cherish and cultivate it."

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