Oh. The biggest crowd I’d addressed to that point was when I introduced Bill Clinton in front of a crowd of three to four thousand people when I was sixteen at an event for Girls Inc. But I could do this. I knew I could do this! This was my moment, the one I’d been waiting for and working toward. If I nailed this speech, it could change my life. So I got to work. I wrote my speech. It began by talking about the anniversary of Michael Brown’s death (which was the next day). I went on to name many others who had been victims of police violence and how young people had taken to the streets to protest the deaths of Eric Garner, Tamir Rice, Sam DuBose, Sandra Bland, Trayvon Martin, Oscar Grant, Walter Scott, and John Crawford III. I talked about the fact that we needed a president who was willing to listen to the voices of these protestors, to take them seriously, to turn thoughts into action. I wrote about why, as a young Black person in support of the Black Lives Matter movement, I decided to throw my support in Bernie’s camp. I talked about the fact that we needed a president who could see that economic and racial inequality were parallel issues, and must be addressed in tandem.
I was proud of the speech. I thought it would hit the right note with the audience, and deliver the message that I wanted, but I’d never written something like this before. So I held my breath as I hit send and emailed it to Jeff Weaver. Just a few hours later, Jeff sent my draft back to me, and there was one edit—in other words, I was right. It was good. I was relieved. But at that point, I had no clue if Bernie or anyone else besides Jeff had read it.
So, I was on my way to Seattle. I was in the air on the plane while two young Black activists interrupted Bernie Sanders while he was giving a speech at a Medicaid event in the city. I saw the video when I landed and looked at the news on my phone. UGH, I thought. What the hell did I just sign up for? I made my way to the venue. I got to the rally about two hours before we were supposed to walk on stage. The holding area was basically a locker room. There’s no makeup, no prep at these kinds of rallies. I got dressed in the women’s bathroom.
Then Jeff Weaver came in. “Kid, how are you? Everything good? The senator thinks we should just tell everyone you work here today.” I was thinking, Oh no; here we go. I was like, “Uh, uh . . . I don’t think this is good . . .” I was trying to find a way to say that I don’t want to be a token, that I was not on the payroll, that I hadn’t been given any training or introduction to the campaign, that it felt like we were kind of flying by the seat of our pants here. But I was also dumbstruck. And then, all of a sudden, I was remembering I still had a job at the trade organization at this point! I hadn’t told them I was leaving to work for Bernie Sanders, because they hadn’t given me paperwork or a start date! I was struggling to find the words, but it was a major cluster backstage at that point. All the people who were speaking at the rally were swarming around, prepping their lines. I needed to be able to stick up for myself, but everyone was talking, and the ones who were focused on me were assuming I’d do what they wanted.
Then Bernie came in with his wife, Jane. Washington state senator Pramila Jayapal (now a congresswoman) was there too. Bernie came over and was like, “Uh, kiddo . . .” And I was like, “Hi, sir, I’m so happy I’m here . . . but folks are saying I should announce my position today in my speech.” He was like, “Yeah, I think that’s great.” I was like, “I don’t know if that’s a good idea, sir . . .” Suddenly, everybody was looking at me! It had gone totally silent in the room. I felt very pressured. Because they were pressuring me. It wasn’t malicious, but it was like: “Hello, miss, we’d like to tell everyone you work here today.”
They wanted to do this for obvious reasons—I’m not stupid. They’d just been harassed by Black activists yet again, and having me go out there and say I’m working on the campaign was an opportunity to change the media narrative; instead of everyone talking about the protestors who interrupted him, they’d be talking about the young press secretary who was also Black that he just hired. They were all just HOPING I would give a good speech. But again: no one had seen my delivery! I was a completely unknown entity at that point—but they liked the way I looked and how I presented myself. And believe me, Bernie was looking at me, Jeff was looking at me, everyone was looking at me, and I thought to myself, Well, I guess I should just use this to my advantage. I didn’t feel I had many options at that point. So I asked: “Are we telling people I’m the NATIONAL press secretary?” Bernie affirmed this. “Who’s introducing me?” I asked. Some tall African American guy—I had no idea who he was at that point—said Senator Jayapal would intro me. Okay. I established, “Just make you say NATIONAL press secretary and my name.” And then I agreed.
Then everyone went out to start the rally—there was no turning back. My mind was still racing, wondering whether I’d truly crossed a boundary line for myself personally, whether this was going to ruin my credibility or my reputation. But then I started to calm down and focus. Yes, I was pressured, and I felt pressured. But I’d already said I wanted to work on the campaign. They had already offered me a job, and I had accepted. Was I being used in the moment? Yes, definitely. But I damn well knew I could also use the moment to my own benefit. So then state senator Jayapal introduced me, I walked out onstage, the crowd went crazy, and I went and gave this speech!
I’d like to say I went out there and killed it, but I had never done a crowd that large before. Though I didn’t get stage fright, I did feel jittery, and I tend to overcompensate when I get jittery. This was one of the few times in my life I was legitimately nervous. Instead of getting timid or tenuous, I come on strong—the more nerves, the louder the volume. So, in this case (and you can see for yourself; the video is on YouTube), I was absolutely yelling into the mic because I was freaking out a little bit, but I also couldn’t hear myself! I wanted to make sure the crowd could hear me and I didn’t trust the mic and I’d never done anything like that before.
Now I look at the video, and am like, I am screaming. Why am I screaming? It’s a good speech; I made some excellent points about how young people’s voices need to be heard, and I look happy and confident and put-together. But why am I screaming? So I finished the speech, and then I introed the senator. I heard myself saying, “So please put your hands together for the next president of the United States—Bernie Sanders!” He hugged me on the podium, and then he told me in my ear, “You’ve definitely got the job.” Whew, I thought. If the speech had sucked, I wouldn’t have gotten the job, so I guess I did okay. Nobody knew if I could do it, and I just did it! I walked off on the little catwalk that led me to the stage, and I stood with some of the other staff to watch Senator Sanders’s speech.
Later that evening, I remember getting an email from my mom; she was asking me if I had the same phone number, because she was seeing me on TV and it was all a little bit surreal. I guess she thought maybe now that I was “famous” I’d suddenly have a new phone number. So funny. So exciting. So not true! Things were still totally in start-up mode. For instance, when I got to the hotel in Seattle, I didn’t have enough money to pay for the room. I was not getting paid from my regular job at the trade org for a few more days, so I called Jeff Weaver and I was like, “Can someone bring a campaign card to put down for the room so I can check in?” This goes back to what I was saying about how we as women are conditioned to be “nice,” to take the burden upon ourselves to be accommodating and accepting. I could have put the charge on my own credit card and kept receipts and tried to get reimbursed and blah, blah, blah, but no. This was a job, which wasn’t even really official yet as far as paperwork and all that. I didn’t need to be “nice” in this situation. I needed a room. I asked the campaign guy who drove me to the hotel if I could authorize the card for incidentals, “Because I would like to eat. Because I have no money!” He was like, “Okay, and I’ll pick you up tomorrow so we can drive to Portland.” I’d been asked to go with the team on the rest of the trip from Seattle to Portland to LA—places I’d never been before.
Journos and bloggers and
commentators were writing all these articles about the announcement. I was feeling good. But then I realized: Damn, I really work here! I needed to figure some things out; I needed to buckle down and learn more about the campaign’s inner workings and the issues, and perhaps most important in the moment, why all these activists kept interrupting the senator on the stage and what I could do about it.
So I got on Twitter. I had, like, maybe six hundred followers at that point. I went to DeRay Mckesson’s profile—he’s a well-known “Black Lives Matter” activist. An activist who specifically made great use of Twitter and social media to get out messages about what was really transpiring on the ground with police violence, in real time. Without Twitter, without social media, no one would have known what was going on as it happened, with both the violence itself and the protests in the aftermath of Michael Brown’s death in Ferguson. I decided to look up DeRay on Twitter and send him a direct message. I emailed him, introduced myself, explained that I was working with Bernie now and that I wanted to talk to him about the protesters. I asked if we could talk. DeRay hit me up an hour later, and we talked on the phone for two hours.
I told DeRay right off: my approach is that I’m solutions-oriented. When I was sixteen, I got business cards printed for myself that I used to walk around and give out that said “I specialize in results.” Actually, that’s still my tagline! In this instance, the result I needed was to open a direct line of communication with these activists and young people who needed to be heard. That was really at the heart of the matter—that’s the goal of disruption: it’s to get the spotlight focused on you so that your message can be heard, so that it rises above all the distraction and daily life and forces people to pay attention. The other result that I needed was to prevent people from hopping on the stage, interrupting the guy that I now worked for. So I had a great conversation with DeRay, and from there I started to devise a plan. Basically, my approach was to reach out proactively to these activists, in any place we were about to appear, and to set up a listening session with them so they could speak with Bernie directly and air their grievances. In return, they promised not to interrupt his campaign speeches and events.
So, Nick Chedli Carter, Senator Sanders’s political outreach director and one of his first campaign hires, picked me up for the drive to Portland. We started talking and he asked, “By the way, why are you here?” So I told him the short version—how I’d gotten the job, how I’d ended up onstage—and he was like, “Damn. That’s crazy.” As we arrived in Portland, we started hearing reports that activists were planning to interrupt the rally that was planned for that evening. Okay, here we go, I thought. I had told Jeff that we needed to find out who was the ringleader of the protests and offer them a sit-down. He and other people on the campaign were skeptical, but I was like, People are interrupting because they feel like they’re not heard, so let’s hear them. But we needed to do that off the record, no press. We needed to reach out. So I asked DeRay: Do you know these folks in Portland? He did! So on the way, I got in touch with a few activists in Portland; Bernie’s advance team also reached out to a few contacts. We promised them a meeting after the rally that was coming up; we told them Bernie would sit down with them for a private discussion, but ONLY if they didn’t interrupt the event itself.
We arrived at the venue, which was a convention center; we were prepping backstage, and everyone was there—Bernie’s advisors, Jeff, campaign staffers, the senator’s wife, Jane—and the senator came over in my direction. Then he stopped and announced to all of us that “they” had decided how they’d like to respond to potential protestors. He said: “If we’re interrupted tonight, Symone needs to jump in and control the room.” Evidently, they wanted me to go up to the mic if there was an interruption and insert myself. I let him explain this plan; I just stood there quietly. I wasn’t even on payroll at this point, and I hadn’t known any of these people in Bernie’s inner circle for more than a matter of days. I cared about their opinions. I cared about my reputation. I don’t want to cause trouble. Bernie was also very fired up, which is understandable—who likes to be interrupted and told they’re racist on top of that?
When he was done explaining, I asked if he would like my opinion. And in his brusque Bernie voice, he was like, “Sure, sure, whaddaya want?” I said respectfully, “I don’t think this is a good idea because the criticism is not of how you are responding to the activists; the criticism is of your supporters—that they don’t care enough about issues of race and discrimination and police violence. [We’d established previously that the campaign had a messaging issue.] So if you are telling me you want me to basically shut it down without giving a directive to the crowd on how they should respond, I don’t think that bodes well. Also: I’m Black. It will seem like I’m being used for this reason. The optics will be terrible.”
He said to me, “We just have a fundamental misunderstanding here,” and went on a tangent. I stood firm. “Sir, I get what you want to say; I’m going to get your point across, but I’m going to do it in a way that makes me feel comfortable.” He walked away in a huff while others tried to explain, “What he’s trying to say is this . . .” In my head I was like, I know what he’s trying to say. You hired me to be your press secretary, not your pep rally girl managing activist logistics. But then Bernie came back. He’d calmed down, and we agreed to my plan. It was go time.
I walked out onstage and I said this, totally off the cuff: “My name is Symone Sanders, and I have the privilege of serving as the chair of the coalition for juvenile justice’s national youth committee. [After this, the juvenile justice committee was like, “Your tenure is over; you can’t be using us on the campaign.”] I am also joining the campaign this week as the national press secretary. Tonight I have the pleasure of serving as your emcee. Now, I have some good information that there might be the potential for a little disruption tonight. So I wanna be very clear. This campaign is about bringing people together. So if that happens—we hope there won’t be a disruption tonight, but if there happens to be a disruption tonight, I want everyone in this stadium to respond with a chant; can y’all do that for me?” The crowd screamed in response that they could. I told them the chant would be “We stand together.” And you know what? No one shouted out or rushed the stage. For now.
After the rally, Senator Sanders, Jeff Weaver, communications director Michael Briggs, and I went to a private room for a small discussion that I had arranged, with DeRay’s help, with a group of seven or eight activists. As we started the conversation, it was clear that they had been planning on interrupting Bernie’s speech before we invited them to speak in this session privately. One of the leaders had been arrested earlier that day, so tensions were high. We sat down for about forty-five minutes, and I moderated the conversation while the young people voiced their concerns. But in reality, I didn’t say much. We were there to listen, not to make promises.
These activists wanted to interrupt because they felt that they were not being heard, and as I told Senator Sanders before we went in to meet with them, we can’t figure out what they want if we’re talking. So we didn’t make policy proposals; we simply let them speak, and the senator asked a couple questions. Nowadays, I would be hesitant to throw any candidate or principal into a room like that—where the principal hasn’t been briefed, where we don’t really know who’s coming to the meeting, where anything can happen, really. I was green, I’ll admit. Now I would know everything there was to know about a group of people like that before I invited them into a room to talk with my candidate. But at the time, I didn’t know much better, and besides, we didn’t have the time.
For the next several months, every place we went we reached out to activists in advance. And I’m proud to say that the protests and the heckling stopped. Once I joined the campaign, no one else interrupted the senator while he was onstage. And then, for me, once I got the hang of my role a little bit, I was like, “I don’t want to sit behind Bernie Sanders when we’re onstage togeth
er anymore.” I can’t be the press secretary if I’m the pep rally girl.
It’s good to be impatient, but change does take time. Often, people work for years to achieve a goal, and then it seems to happen overnight because they cross a threshold where their efforts are finally visible. As young as I am, working now for Vice President Biden, I worked on seventeen campaigns, small ones and large ones, before I got to this place.
Big ideas are what move us forward, but incremental steps are sometimes required in order for progress to happen. We cannot wait for a perfect moment, for the stars to align, for the planets to be in step, and THEN take a big leap. Sometimes it’s possible, yes. But more often, to achieve the goal of the big idea, we have to get moving in the right direction first. Before we can get to zero emissions by 2050, we have to rejoin the Paris Climate Agreement. A few years ago, saying “universal health coverage” would have prompted immediate and swift lambasting of any candidate who dared utter the words. I was on the campaign trail in a red state in 2014, and believe me, people were not even talking about universal health care “back then,” just six years ago. It’s clear that we wouldn’t be having the conversation about universal health care now without the Affordable Care Act that passed in 2010 (aka Obamacare). People’s opinions have changed, but it took time. The majority of Americans now believe health care is a right.
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