[4] He also served as a trial attorney with the Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights Under Law[4] and ran as the Democratic nominee for U.S. Congress for the 10th District of Virginia in 1998.

[2][3][4] Brooks began his career serving a judicial clerkship with Chief Judge Sam J. Ervin, III, on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit.

James Edmund Prioleau, ran for Congress in the 1940s as a Progressive Democrat in a symbolic effort to help increase voter registration among blacks and recruit NAACP members.

[4] Following his tenure with the NAACP, Brooks has held a variety of appointments in higher education, including visiting professor of social ethics, law, & justice movements at Boston University,[8] visiting fellow and director of the Campaigns and Advocacy Program at the Institute of Politics at the Harvard Kennedy School,[9] and a senior fellow at the New York University School of Law.

[16] He also led a 7-day "Journey for Justice" through Missouri from the Canfield Green Apartments, where unarmed 18-year-old Michael Brown was shot and killed by a Ferguson police officer, to Jefferson City in 2014.

NAACP staff, volunteers, and allies marched 1,002 miles from Selma, AL to Washington, DC to demonstrate the urgency of voting rights and police reform.

[21] America's Journey for Justice – and the thousands who marched by day and slept in synagogues and church halls by night – worked to consolidate support among progressive organizations to advance voting rights legislation in the House and the Senate.

[22] The NAACP led a coalition of nearly 300 grassroots organizations representing thirty million members in mass rallies and protests at the Capitol in the spring of 2016 to call for restoration of the Voting Rights Act and a fully seated Supreme Court.

The NAACP organized a sit-in at Senator Sessions' Alabama office, turning his workplace into a digital and broadcast platform to teach the country about the evils of voter suppression.

The NAACP successfully advocated for the Missouri Municipal Fine Law after the death of Michael Brown, as well as the federal racial profiling guidance during the Obama administration.

[29] To combat the culture of mass incarceration, NAACP staff and members successfully pushed for more Ban-the-Box laws in states and municipalities across the country.

[36] Brooks was praised for how he handled allegations that Rachel Dolezal, former president of the NAACP's Spokane, WA chapter, was a white woman who was telling people she was Black.

In a The Wall Street Journal article on the NAACP's treatment of the controversy, Anthony Johndrow, co-founder and CEO of Reputation Economy Advisors, said: "I cannot think of an organization that has done a better job of using the attention that comes from a crisis to emphasize a core message 'to ensure the political, educational, social, and economic equality of rights of all persons.'

For an organization that has largely been out of the public eye for some time, it is surprising how articulate and focused the NAACP is on both its civil and human rights mission and its intersection with the far more weighty issues of the day ...

[39] The press coverage of Brooks' departure reflected a general sense of surprise at the Board's unexpected decision,[40] and several, including the president of the National Congress of Black Women, spoke out in favor of his reinstatement.