Morris Jackson Brooks, popularly known as Mo Brooks, is an American attorney and a politician. A member of the Republican party, Brooks is a US Rep. and a US Senate candidate for Alabama.  

He has been serving Huntsville, Alabama’s fifth congressional district, since 2011. The six-term conservative congressman is also a founding member of Freedom Caucus, a congressional caucus comprising conservative Republicans of the United States House of Representatives. 

The 67-year-old announced his candidacy for the US Senate on March 22, 2021, after the seat was vacated by Alabama Senator Richard Shelby in 2022. 

He was heavily endorsed by former US President Donald Trump until recently,  when the 75-year-old withdrew the endorsement, bashing him for being “woke” and “disloyal”.

Brooks was born in 1954 in Charleston, South Carolina. After almost a decade, he moved to Huntsville, Alabama, where he attended Grissom High School. His mother, Betty J. Brooks, was an economics educator for over 20 years at Lee High School. 

His father, Morris Jackson Brooks Sr., hailed from Chattanooga, Tennessee, earning a living as an electrical engineer. He retired from Redstone Arsenal’s Meteorology Center. 

After graduating from Grissom High School in 1972, Brooks pursued a double major in economics and political science from Duke University. In 1978, he received his Juris Doctor degree from the University of Alabama School of Law. 

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Brooks began his legal career by working as a prosecutor at the Tuscaloosa County district attorney’s office. 

After working as a law clerk, practicing lawyer and counsel at various institutions, Brooks was elected to the Alabama House of Representatives in 1982, eventually earning a reelection in 1983, 1986, and 1990.

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In 2010, he became the first Republican elected to Congress in Alabama’s Fifth Congressional District in over 130 years by unseating an incumbent Congressman. 

Mo Brooks is married to Martha Jenkins. Together since 1976, the couple has four kids and ten grandchildren.