Senator Edward W. Brooke, the first African American popularly elected to the U.S. Senate, delivered the commencement address at Wellesley College in 1969 — one of the most turbulent years in American history. The speech took place against the backdrop of the Vietnam War, the assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert F. Kennedy the previous year, and widespread campus unrest across the country. Brooke's warning about purposeless protest was carefully calibrated. As a Black Republican senator who had himself broken racial barriers, he was neither dismissing the legitimacy of protest nor endorsing the status quo. He was drawing a distinction between dissent aimed at specific injustices with concrete goals — which he supported — and protest as a form of self-expression or social performance, which he believed cheapened the democratic tools that marginalized communities had fought so hard to secure.