Instead, Trump’s Muslim ban happened.
After Trump’s executive order was announced late on Friday, Sally spent the weekend thinking about the ban, then showed up at work on Monday, ready to figure out whether it was constitutional. There were two major problems. First, by banning people from Muslim-majority countries while giving preferential treatment to Syrian Christians, the order appeared to violate the Establishment Clause of the First Amendment: “Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof.…” Our government must not favor one religion over another—yet this executive order clearly seemed to favor Christians over Muslims. Add to that Trump’s repeated pledge on the campaign trail to ban Muslims from entering America, and the religious intent of this executive order seemed even clearer.
Second, by imposing a sweeping ban on everyone from those seven countries—including people with legal visas and those who had already established legal residency in the U.S.—the order presented a due-process problem. The Constitution promises—in two different places—that no one should be “deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law.” The provision applies to citizens and noncitizens alike. It means you can’t just take valid visas and green cards away from people arbitrarily. Everyone deserves due process—for example, a hearing where people would have a chance to make a case as to why they couldn’t return to their country. But Trump’s ban didn’t allow for that. It just said, Keep them out—and if they’re here already, throw them out.
At the Justice Department that Monday, Sally Yates considered all of this. She read the executive order carefully. She convened a meeting of government lawyers, including several appointed by Trump, and asked them to give their best possible defenses of the ban. She reflected on the Constitution and the oath she’d sworn to uphold it. She thought about what the Establishment Clause means to a country founded on religious freedom, and what due process represents in a country that believes all people are created equal and that promises equal justice to all. She decided that she could not defend the legality of the ban.
Then she made an extraordinarily courageous decision.
Sally could have resigned. She could have walked away from the whole mess and let the next guy deal with it. The message would have been clear: “My conscience won’t let me be a part of this for even one day more.” But what would that mean for the institution to which Sally had devoted nearly her entire professional life? As she put it later, “Resignation would have protected my own personal integrity.… But I believed that I had an obligation to also protect the integrity of the Department of Justice.”
She didn’t want to see the Justice Department defend an illegal and unconstitutional order. And though she couldn’t prevent that from happening indefinitely, she could prevent it right then. She had that power, because she was in charge.
So Sally Yates wrote a statement: “For as long as I am the Acting Attorney General, the Department of Justice will not present arguments in defense of the Executive Order, unless and until I become convinced that it is appropriate to do so.” Then she sent the statement to Justice Department employees across the country and to the White House. And she sat back and waited for what she knew would happen next.
Four hours later, a letter arrived from the White House. After nearly three decades of faithfully serving the American people and defending the U.S. Constitution, Sally Yates had been fired.
Since that day, she has continued to comport herself with dignity and integrity. Her appearance before the Senate Judiciary Committee a few months later was a master class in remaining composed and respectful even in the face of bluster and bullying. (As someone who once spent eleven hours in that hot seat, I know how tough that is to pull off.) She testified persuasively about not only her decision on the Muslim ban but also her attempts to alert the White House to how National Security Advisor Michael Flynn had been compromised by the Russians. At a time when it seems like the people in charge care far less about our national security and the integrity of our institutions than about their own political fortunes, Sally reminded us that a different way is possible.
Sally reminds me of so many dedicated civil and foreign service officers I’ve worked with over the years who put country and Constitution above everything else, including themselves. They’re the best of America, and we’re lucky to have them.
Now that she’s a private citizen, working as a partner in a law firm and speaking out about her experiences in government, people often ask Sally to consider running for office. So far, she’s demurred—but she hasn’t ruled it out. I hope she does run. She’d be great at holding office. But whether she does or not, future generations of public servants will always have her to look up to. And we’re all the better for it.
Kimberly Bryant and Reshma Saujani
KIMBERLY BRYANT
RESHMA SAUJANI
Chelsea
Kimberly Bryant loved math and science as a kid. She was an unapologetic, self-proclaimed nerd. As someone who has always thought it absurd and wrong that “nerd” is sometimes used as an insult or a bad word, I love that Kimberly reclaimed it. In the early 1980s, she embraced her love of “nerdy” subjects and joined the math team at Memphis Central High School in Tennessee. She was always searching for role models who looked like her, and not finding many. After high school, she studied electrical engineering at Vanderbilt. As excited as she was by all of the innovation happening in her field, she couldn’t help but notice, again, that she was one of the few women, and the only black woman, in most of her lectures and discussions. “Few of my classmates looked like me,” she later observed.
She was working as a project manager for a tech company in San Francisco when her ten-year-old daughter, Kai, signed up for summer coding classes at Stanford. Kai couldn’t wait for the first day; she loved video games and wanted to become a coder when she grew up. But when Kimberly dropped her off, she had a startling realization: Twenty years after her own college experiences, her daughter had no classmates who looked like her.
Kimberly knew she had to do something. She left corporate America in 2010 to start a new organization, Black Girls Code. Now their camps and classes reach eight thousand black, Latina, and Native American girls across the U.S. She has also extended her work to include girls in Johannesburg, South Africa. As girls in the Black Girls Code programs learn how to build their own app, or understand more about robotics and artificial intelligence, Kimberly has said she can see their confidence growing in front of her. Building a diverse pipeline of talent isn’t just the right thing to do, she has repeatedly pointed out—it’s the smart thing for companies who want to compete and win in the future. “Imagine the impact these curious, creative minds could have on the world with the guidance and encouragement others take for granted,” she rightly said. Soon we won’t have to imagine. As the Black Girls Code graduates go through college, graduate school, and their careers, the world will see what they build, create, and then help others imagine.
When Reshma Saujani ran for Congress in 2010, she had a moment of reckoning somewhat reminiscent of Kimberly’s at the Stanford code camp drop-off. As Reshma campaigned in New York City, she didn’t meet many women working at the tech companies she spoke to. When she visited computer science classes, she saw a familiar sight everywhere she went: computer labs full of boys learning to code. She didn’t win that election or her next. But along the way, she found a new and powerful calling: working to close the gender gap in tech.
I was lucky enough to visit one of Reshma’s early summer coding programs. The energy and enthusiasm were infectious, the environment full of optimism. The girls were from all across New York City and building apps they wanted to use to chase opportunities or solve problems they had identified. Reshma knew the statistics: huge numbers of girls who are interested in math and science in elementary school lose interest by age fifteen. She also knew how formative those early school years had been in her own li
fe.
Reshma’s family was expelled from Uganda in 1972, after Idi Amin’s government ordered all Ugandans of South Asian descent to leave within ninety days. Her parents ultimately immigrated to Illinois. The bigotry her family had encountered didn’t stop in their new country. In middle school, Reshma endured hateful, racist bullying. She worked hard, determined to do everything perfectly. That goal, in itself, taught her a lesson about what happens to girls in middle and high school. In her words: “We’re raising our girls to be perfect, and we’re raising our boys to be brave.”
She finished college in three years and set her sights on an ambitious goal: going to Yale Law School. The first time she applied, she was rejected. And the second time. And the third. She refused to give up, and on her fourth try, she got in. Once again, she worked hard to do everything perfectly. It wasn’t until she left her job at a big-name investment firm to run for office that she finally felt free to go after the risks she had always been afraid to take. “It turns out when you get a taste for being brave, it’s hard to stop,” she said. That realization also helped inspire the title of Reshma’s terrific book, Brave, Not Perfect.
From a summer program started in 2012, her program Girls Who Code has since worked with tens of thousands of girls across all fifty states. It now runs after-school programs along with its summer programs, and it developed open-source curriculum and guides that anyone, anywhere, can use to learn to imagine, code, and build. Reshma has built a behemoth to tackle a massive problem. Not only is she equipping girls with the skills for their future careers, she’s teaching them that it’s okay to take risks, get things wrong, make mistakes, and try again.
Black Girls Code and Girls Who Code are not alone in teaching that lesson. There are now numerous groups focused on teaching girls how to code—from summer camps where girls come together to build their own apps to organizations that hold meetups and hackathons to programs focused on the intersection of technology, entrepreneurship, and social impact. Even the Girl Scouts are now helping girls learn to code: There are badges in robotics, website design, cybersecurity, and creating algorithms.
With their energy, innovation, and problem-solving, Reshma and Kimberly are part of a group of women who are transforming an entire field from the inside out—and helping to build a brighter future for all of us in the process.
Women’s Rights Champions
Rosa May Billinghurst
Chelsea
In high school, we studied the traditional story of women’s suffrage: the Declaration of Sentiments from the 1848 women’s rights convention in Seneca Falls onward, as well as Mary Wollstonecraft’s famous manifesto, A Vindication of the Rights of Women. But much of what I knew about suffrage and women’s rights I learned from my mom, her friends, and our travels. I thought it bizarre that I hadn’t learned more about the women from around the world to whom we owed so much, and I decided to start seeking out their stories on my own—from Kate Sheppard, who led the women’s suffrage movement in New Zealand, the first country in the world to grant suffrage to all women, including indigenous Maori women, to the tough and determined Rosa May Billinghurst in England.
After surviving polio as a child in London, May, as she was known, decided that the use of her legs would be the only thing that disease would take from her. She had to confront the horrible prejudices that were all too common in the United Kingdom of the late nineteenth century against people with disabilities. In her twenties, May taught Sunday school, worked to raise awareness about the horrors of contemporary poverty in her community and around the country, and supported the temperance movement. Another cause she took up as a young woman would become a defining part of her life: women’s suffrage.
“The government authorities may further maim my body by the torture of forcible feeding as they are torturing weak women in prison at the present time. They may even kill me in the process for I am not strong, but they cannot take away my freedom of spirit or my determination to fight this good fight to the end.”
—ROSA MAY BILLINGHURST
In 1910, when she was in her midthirties, May took part in a protest against Prime Minister H. H. Asquith, who had blocked a bill that would have enfranchised one million women in Britain and Ireland. She was able to attend demonstrations and participate in protests because of her hand tricycle, which enabled her to use her arms to power herself, all while sitting or reclining. Hundreds of women were brutally assaulted by police that day, which became known as Black Friday. May was one of them. She recounted the event in the newspaper afterward: “At first the police threw me out of the machine and on to the ground in a very brutal manner. Secondly, when on the machine again they tried to push me along with my arms twisted behind me in a very painful position.… Thirdly, they took me down a side road and left me in the middle of a hooligan crowd, first taking all the valves out of the wheels and pocketing them so that I could not move the machine.”
May’s treatment by the police made her that much more determined to fight. Soon she was back at another protest, where she was arrested for attempting to use her wheelchair to ram through the crowd in London’s Parliament Square. In 1912, May was arrested again, and not for the last time, for her participation in the window smashing campaign, a coordinated protest against Parliament’s repeated failure to pass proposed legislation to grant women the right to vote. She was sentenced to hard labor, wheelchair and all. Her numerous arrests drew significant attention, with the press and even some of her fellow suffragettes pointing to her as a “cripple.” She didn’t shy away from the spotlight, as long as it furthered her cause; she once chained herself to the railing in front of Buckingham Palace.
May was force-fed in prison, as were many suffragettes who were arrested while protesting for their fundamental right to vote. None of this deterred her, and she continued to work for suffrage until 1918, when the UK granted property-owning women thirty and older the right to vote. Women in the UK wouldn’t receive the same voting rights as men until 1928, when voting rights were extended to all people twenty-one and older. May, along with many other courageous women, helped make that possible, even inevitable.
May’s political activism lessened after her cause was won, though she did continue to support other feminist efforts throughout her life. Her obituary in the Women’s Freedom League bulletin described her as having “a strong sense of humor, even perhaps, a mischievous one… full of life and courage and not to mention jollity.” A fierce believer in reincarnation, she thought “of this life as but one of many.” She proved, again and again, that she was ready to sacrifice her physical safety, even her life, for the cause she believed in. Though her story is too often forgotten, even in histories of the suffrage movement, her personal fortitude and dedication make her a standout in an era of fierce women.
The Suffragists
Hillary
The history of women’s suffrage in the United States is too often taught as the story of a few brave women—a few brave white women, to be precise. Those who were fortunate enough to learn about the fight to grant “Votes for Women” in school may know the names of Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton. They may even have studied the rift between the suffragists and abolitionists that occurred when Congress granted black men the right to vote but left women of any race behind, and discussed the fact that even after the Nineteenth Amendment was ratified in 1920, it would take decades for women of color to win the right to vote.
But the story of how women in the United States won the right to vote starts long before the Nineteenth Amendment was ratified, nearly one hundred years ago. It goes back almost one thousand years to the Iroquois Confederacy in what is now upstate New York, where it was women who elected and deposed male leaders. It carries forward through the rights of some women in the original colonies to vote until the Constitution and new state and local laws systematically stripped away that right. It is accelerated by defiant women like Angelina Grimké and her sister, Sarah, who famously said: “I ask
no favors for my sex.… All I ask of our brethren is that they will take their feet from off our necks and permit us to stand upright.” It continues through the decades-long effort of Native Americans to win voting rights state by state and through the civil rights movement’s efforts to enforce voting rights nationally and locally—struggles that, as evidenced by the 2018 efforts to strip away voting rights and access in North Dakota, Georgia, and elsewhere, wage on today.
One of the most important chapters in this story was written in 1848. At the famous Seneca Falls Convention in upstate New York, one hundred women and men signed their names to the Declaration of Sentiments, rewriting the Declaration of Independence to boldly assert: “We hold these truths to be self-evident: that all men and women are created equal.” They faced criticism and derision; they were called “mannish women,” old maids, and fanatics. One paper said granting rights to women would result in “a monstrous injury to all mankind.” Only one of the signatories—Charlotte Woodward, a nineteen-year-old glove maker from Waterloo, New York—would live to see women cast ballots in a presidential election.
After the Civil War, black women assumed prominent roles in the struggle to achieve equality for both their race and sex. If you open an American passport, you will see this quote: “The cause of freedom is not the cause of a race or a sect, a party or a class—it is the cause of humankind, the very birthright of humanity.” Yet few people know the author of those words: Anna Julia Haywood Cooper.
The Book of Gutsy Women Page 38