Stalwart Hill Public Servant Dies

Andrea Jackson-Brooks, a Hill alder and state representative whose decades-long career in politics earned her widespread admiration for her commitment to public service, passed away on Sunday. She was 79. 

Jackson-Brooks represented the Hill’s Ward 4 on the Board of Alders for 15 years. She served two terms as state representative for New Haven’s 95th Connecticut General Assembly district. She worked as former Mayor John DeStefano’s executive assistant and as an assistant in the state comptroller’s office, and chaired the board of Cornell Scott Hill Health Center.

“She just had a love for her people,” her son Talib Muhammad told the Independent.

She was ​“just always wanting to give back. … If people in the neighborhood needed something, she was there for them,” added her older son, Danny Gant. ​“She was just always a giver.”

“She served the community so well, with such dignity and graciousness,” said her friend Elizabeth Hilton, who served as Jackson-Brooks’ conservator in the final years of her life and who worked for the city in the early 2000s when Jackson-Brooks was an alder. ​“She gave love. She was love. And she recognized love.”

Muhammad, Gant, Hilton, and the Celentano Funeral Home all confirmed that Jackson-Brooks passed away on Sunday. She spent the end of her life at Mary Wade Home in Fair Haven. Her oldest son said that she suffered from Alzheimer’s.

Much of Jackson-Brooks’ life and work in New Haven took place in the Hill.

In early 2020, relatives and former political colleagues came out to the Board of Alders to speak in support of the renaming of Spring Street and Dewitt Street as ​“Andrea Jackson-Brooks Way.”

“You can’t find a nicer person who worked harder and cared so much as Andrea,” former Lt. Gov. Nancy Wyman said at a February 2020 aldermanic committee meeting about the corner renaming honoring her former colleague. She said she first got to know Jackson-Brooks when they both served in the state House of Representatives. They worked even more closely together several years later when Jackson came to work for Wyman in the latter’s capacity as state comptroller.

“She would stand up for what she believed in, and you better have listened,” Wyman said at the time. ​“She loved her family and she loved this city. She was a fighter for this city.”

Former Ward 4 Alder, Board of Alders President, and mayoral Chief of Staff Tomas Reyes turned out to the same meeting to speak glowingly about Jackson-Brooks when she served as Ward 4’s Democratic Ward Committee co-chair during his time as alder. ​“When I became president of the board, she became a state rep. And she did that job exceedingly well,” he said at the time. ​“She earned a reputation very quickly as a state representative that could get things done, and would always remember where she came from.”

At a May 2020 corner renaming ceremony in the Hill, neighbors and elected officials and city leaders continued that line of praise, as Jackson-Brooks watched on from the second-floor balcony of her home at the corner of Spring and Dewitt.

“She made a lot of us leaders. Her legacy has been in us, but now it is physical too,” current Ward 4 Alder Evelyn Rodriguez said at that ceremony. ​“She pushed me to respect everyone, do my best, and always invest with my neighbors.”

Her sons, Gant and Muhammad, told the Independent on Monday that their mom’s dedication to public service extended well before she moved to New Haven in the early 1980s.

During the Civil Rights era of the 1960s, she worked with the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) in Baltimore. In the 1970s, she moved to Georgia and worked as an assistant to then-Gov., and future President, Jimmy Carter. When she moved to New Haven in 1981, she and her husband, Walter Brooks, spent much of their lives involved in local politics, as alders and state reps.

“She’s always been one who wanted to help her community,” said Muhammad.

She also loved playing soccer, and encouraged her kids to play too. ​“She was my number one cheerleader,” Muhammad said.

Her commitment to public service loomed large in New Haven, and her work touched the lives of many. ​“There’s not too many people in this area,” Gant said, ​“who don’t know” Andrea Jackson-Brooks.

Click here to read Andrea Jackson-Brooks’ obituary, as posted to the Celentano Funeral Home website.