by Curtis Bunn
“The black masses must demand and refuse to accept nothing less than that proportionate percentage of the political spoils such as jobs, elective offices, and appointments,” Powell said. “They must reject the shameful racial tokenism that characterizes the political life of America today.”
Historian Charles V. Hamilton, in his 1992 political biography about Powell, wrote: “Here was a person who [in the 1940s] would at least speak out…That would be different…Many Negroes were angry that no Northern liberals would get up on the floor of Congress and challenge the segregationists…Powell certainly promised to do that.
“[In] the 1940s and 1950s, he was, indeed, virtually alone…And precisely because of that, he was exceptionally crucial. In many instances during those earlier times, if he did not speak out, the issue would not have been raised.”
Powell, in a bold calculation, challenged Mississippi congressman John Elliott Rankin on the house floor for using the word “nigger.” It was call-out culture before there was call-out culture. And it marked a historic shift in how Black politicians managed the racism of their colleagues.
“He certainly did not change Rankin’s mind or behavior,” Hamilton wrote, “but he gave solace to millions who longed for a little retaliatory defiance.” And hope.
The 1950s
In the 1950s, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. took over the political and social world order. He elevated Black causes to a higher plateau. But King was not a political figure, and while his behavior influenced political decisions, he had no hand in them.
As Dr. King changed the course of history—and Malcolm X emerged as an indomitable force in his own right—Black politicians made their own marks in various ways, many of which echoed the starkest differences between Dr. King and Malcolm.
When Charles C. Diggs Jr. was just thirty-one, he was elected to the House of Representatives, making him the first Black congressman from Michigan. Like Powell before him, Diggs was vocal in his support of civil rights. He was among the first Black politicians to fight for Congress to issue government aid to various parts of Africa, a continent that had been all but dismissed due in no small part to racist attitudes and beliefs.
But whereas Powell had been fueled by the benevolence that comes from enacting God’s will, Diggs was less conciliatory. Whereas Powell pushed the envelope with what a Black politician could do, Diggs set that envelope on fire.
After the death of Emmett Till, Diggs called for white racists to be killed. “That picture [of Till in a casket] stimulated a lot of interest and anger on the part of Blacks all over the country,” Diggs said.
U.S. Representative John Conyers Jr. of Detroit said Diggs paved the way for an entire generation of Black political leaders.
The 1960s
In the 1960s, James Brown’s “Say It Loud, I’m Black and I’m Proud” served as the anthem to an acceptance of Black beauty and a belief in Black power. Just as before with Dr. King and Malcolm, political machinations ran parallel to social justice initiatives, such as the marches and sit-ins, that dominated the news media at that time.
In 1965, John Conyers of Michigan was elected to the House of Representatives. He took the political power that was individuated by Black members of Congress and he collectivized it, uniting Black politicians.
In addition to being a leader for his Black colleagues, he also got in the ring with the powerful whites. Conyers was the sole African American member of the House Judiciary Committee, one of the most powerful committees in Congress.
After Dr. King’s assassination on April 4, 1968, Conyers spent the next fifteen years fighting alongside powerhouse representative Shirley Chisholm of New York to make King’s birthday a federal holiday. That year was also a historic year for another reason: It saw the election of Chisholm.
Chisholm was the first Black woman elected to the United States Congress, at a time when Black women held virtually no positions of power within government.
As with Powell before her, Chisholm was a staunch advocate for the poor and sponsored food and nutrition programs for residents in her district. Like Diggs, she was not bashful about what she saw as her place in the world—or her legacy.
“My greatest political asset, which professional politicians fear, is my mouth, out of which come all kinds of things one shouldn’t always discuss for reasons of political expediency,” Chisholm said.
In 1972, Chisholm became the first Black woman to seek the presidency, even though she knew the country was far from ready. “I want history to remember me, not as the first Black woman to have made a bid for the presidency of the United States,” she said, “but as a Black woman who lived in the twentieth century and who dared to be herself. I want to be remembered as a catalyst for change in America.”
Indeed where Powell, Diggs, and Conyers before her had their eyes on what was wrong with this country, Chisholm had her eyes on the future.
Inspired by how far Chisholm had gone, Barbara Jordan ran for the state senate and later became the first Black Texas state senator after Reconstruction and the first Black woman to sit in the Texas State Senate. But for Jordan, it wasn’t enough that she succeed. She made it her mission to get more Black women elected: “Life is too large to hang out a sign: ‘For Men Only,’” she said. And life was definitely too short to hang a “For Whites Only” sign.
In Austin, Jordan worked to pass a state minimum wage law that covered struggling farmworkers—a crowning achievement in such a red state. She sponsored bills helping elders, children, and the homeless. She considered supporting teachers critical. She said education is critical to achieving economic and political empowerment.
The 1970s
As Jordan fought for the rights of Black Texans, Charles Rangel was fighting for Black rights at a federal level. In 1971, he replaced Adam Clayton Powell as congressman in New York, winning the election by just 150 votes. Rangel’s arrival in D.C. grew the number of Black congressmen to thirteen, and that February, he built off the work Conyers had done to collectivize Black voices in Congress and made the motion that declared them to be the Congressional Black Caucus (CBC).
The CBC puts forth policy and legislation that ensure equal rights, opportunity, and access to Black Americans and other marginalized communities. Over the years, the group has only grown in influence.
In addition to co-founding the CBC (with Conyers), Rangel became the first Black to chair the powerful House Ways and Means Committee, a post that represented a monumental step in Black politics. It signaled there were few limits to where Black politicians could rise.
While Powell’s work lived at the intersection of religion and politics, Rangel’s incorporated business. A lawyer, he centered much of his platform on empowering Black New Yorkers through entrepreneurship. In 1995, he helped establish the Upper Manhattan Empowerment Zone Development Corporation, which significantly boosted Harlem’s economic status for African Americans and helped create Black businesses. Rangel marks a shift in Black politicians who saw their role as not only being about securing the welfare of Black individuals but also about helping to increase their economic prosperity. In doing so, he aligned himself with members of the Black church who would later do the same thing.
The 1980s
Chicago was becoming a focal point for an emerging Black political crusade. As Black people in Chicago became more disillusioned in a political system that continued to ignore them, a Baptist preacher who had marched with Dr. King and served as a disciple in King’s inner circle emerged as Chicago’s next Black leader with an eye on politics: Jesse Jackson.
Calls for “RUN, JESSE, RUN!” echoed through Black communities across the nation, and in 1984, Jackson became the second African American to make a national bid for the U.S. presidency. The historic campaign garnered 3.5 million votes, which was about 3 million more votes than Chisholm had received.
“That explosion of hope—despite voter suppression and systemic racist policies—was shocking to many people,” said Dorothy Butler Gill
iam, the first Black female reporter for the Washington Post. “I remember Jesse Jackson’s shout to his audiences when he ran for president in 1984: ‘Keep Hope Alive! Keep Hope Alive!’”
Whereas other politicians had worked to mobilize their base, Jackson formed a coalition based on a multicultural alliance and a campaign to address voter intimidation and harassment, as well as stricter voter ID and ballot requirements. Jackson’s campaign also featured an extensive voter registration drive, which increased Black turnout.
“The Jackson ’88 campaign theme was ‘The Empowerment of All People.’ The reverend sought to empower individuals to provide for themselves and challenged the political narrative by using words such as ‘hope’ and presenting policies that expanded people’s sense of the possible,” said Craig Kirby, a seasoned Democratic operative who served as Jackson’s political aide in 1988.
The 1980s also brought the emergence of another influential Black politician: David Dinkins. In 1989, Dinkins became the first African American to serve as mayor of New York City. He defeated Republican Rudy Giuliani, who years later would become a Trump minion.
While Dinkins sought to make New York City a more just place, he also navigated the blatant racism of a city that was then known as “Up South.” In one example, in 1992, an estimated 10,000 off-duty, nearly all-white NYPD officers stormed City Hall to protest Dinkins’s policies. Many of the officers carried guns, drank beer, cursed, and some screamed racial epithets.
Some reporters and bystanders were assaulted by the mob, which vandalized property and carried signs that read “Dump the Washroom Attendant.”
“Beer cans and broken beer bottles littered the streets as Mr. Giuliani led the crowd in chants,” the New York Times reported. “It was his second appearance at a police gathering in several weeks. Earlier, Mr. Giuliani attended a Patrolmen’s Benevolent Association convention in the Catskills. At the City Hall demonstration, at least one Giuliani supporter circulated through the crowd handing out voter registration cards, and many protesters wore paraphernalia with a decidedly political slant: new white T-shirts bearing the words ‘Dinkins must go’ and buttons printed: ‘Fight Crime. Dump Dinkins.’”
Unlike many of the firebrands who had come before Dinkins on the political stage, Dinkins’s reaction to the protests, as well as his approach more generally, was calm and measured, in a way that would later be echoed by President Obama.
“Dave Dinkins was the road that ultimately led to the election of Barack Obama,” Reverend Al Sharpton said. “There was David Dinkins talking about the gorgeous mosaic that made many of us understand when Obama said, ‘Yes we can’ because we had done it in New York under David Dinkins. He mentored many that went on to state and city legislatures. He mentored me as an activist.”
But unlike Obama, Dinkins would lose reelection. In 1993, Dinkins’s historic term would end and Giuliani’s would begin, in what would presage Trump’s ascent at the end of Obama’s historic presidency.
The 1990s
The decade opened with a bang: Douglas Wilder was sworn in as the first Black governor elected in U.S. history. Five months into his tenure in Virginia, Wilder ordered state agencies and universities to divest themselves of investments in South Africa because of its policy of apartheid, making his the first Southern state to take such action.
A product of historically Black Virginia Union University in Richmond, Wilder said during his inauguration speech: “As complexities of human relationships increase, the power to govern them also increases. The proper use of that power must always be subordinated to the public good and that shall be uppermost in the hearts and minds of those to whom those powers are justly delegated by the people.
“We shall not pause; we shall not rest upon laurels. For we have not fulfilled our destinies.”
Wilder’s political destinies were many. He also was the state’s first African American senator when he won a runoff election in 1969. After his term as governor, he became the mayor of Richmond.
Lawyer Carol Moseley Braun was another force. She watched Chisholm and Jordan gain political power, and she followed their path, becoming the first Black woman in the U.S. Senate and the first woman to defeat an incumbent U.S. senator in an election.
Moseley Braun took up the mantle of those who had come before her in refusing to keep silent about the unseen barriers preventing Black people and women from holding more political power. She said, “The reason that minorities and women don’t have a better shot at getting elected to the Senate or to statewide office is because the campaign finance rules are so skewed as to make it very difficult for non-traditional candidates to raise the money necessary to get elected.”
Whereas Powell had called his colleagues out for their racist behavior, Moseley Braun subverted it. In 1993, Moseley Braun persuaded the Senate Judiciary Committee not to renew a design patent for the United Daughters of the Confederacy because it contained the Confederate flag, which conjures images of slavery for many African Americans. It was a historic move.
Like Chisholm before her, Moseley Braun visualized a Black woman in the White House. And if not herself, then she understood that her actions paved the way for someone else. “Frankly, for me the big challenge is to have people believe that I can be the president of the United States,” she said.
For Moseley Braun, women in politics is crucial.
“Because the whole idea of democracy is that you tap the population for ideas about how government should work,” she said. “And if you start off with a narrow band of people whose ideas are being heard and paid attention to, then what you’re going to do is wind up with lopsided policies.
“Women are everywhere on the spectrum in terms of [ideology]. But they do bring a different set of life experiences to bear on the policy question. They can reach a conclusion that doesn’t require, if you will, winners and losers…And that serves everybody’s interests, because what you wind up with are policies that serve the interests of the entire population.”
The 1990s was also when Representative Maxine Waters of California, who has knocked on the door for justice for fifteen terms, was elected to Congress, making her the most senior Black female voice in D.C.
Like Powell before her, Waters did not believe in sitting idle during times of civil unrest. During the traumatic aftermath of the Rodney King verdict in 1992, which acquitted officers who were caught on film beating King with batons as he struggled on the ground, Waters led the powerful chant, “No justice, no peace” during marches.
Waters helped deliver relief supplies in Watts and demanded the resumption of vital services. “If you call it a riot, it sounds like it was just a bunch of crazy people who went out and did bad things for no reason,” Waters said. “I maintain it was somewhat understandable, if not acceptable.”
The dramatic response to the verdict, she said, “was a spontaneous reaction to a lot of injustice. There were mothers who took this as an opportunity to take some milk, to take some bread, to take some shoes. They are not crooks.”
During fourteen years in the California State Assembly, Waters rose to the powerful position of Democratic caucus chair. She was responsible for some of the boldest legislation California has ever seen: the largest divestment of state pension funds from South Africa; landmark affirmative action legislation; the nation’s first statewide child abuse prevention training program; the prohibition of police strip searches for nonviolent misdemeanors; and the introduction of the nation’s first plant closure law.
She also helped shape public policy that delivered $10 billion in Section 108 loan guarantees to cities for economic and infrastructure development, housing, and small business expansion; appropriated $50 million for the “Youth Fair Chance” program, which established a job and life skills training program for unskilled, unemployed youth; expanded the U.S. debt relief for Africa and other developing nations; and created a Center for Women Veterans, among others.
“I’ve been in this struggle for many years now,”
Waters said. “I understand racism. I understand that there are a lot of people in this country who don’t care about the problems of the inner city. We have to fight every day that we get up for every little thing that we get. And so I keep struggling.”
The 2000s
Barack Obama’s election in 2008 to the highest office in the country was a change that was only possible because of the work the Black politicians before him had done to pave the way.
Obama’s presence in the White House served as the manifestation of the often-used proclamation by Black parents that, “You can be whatever you want to be.” They had never seen a Black president and were not optimistic they ever would. But there was Obama, and that proverbial proclamation became an infusion of real promise.
In an interview with a Black reporter in 2008, Obama said: “The decline of wages and incomes for African American families during the Bush era has been significant.” He added, “So I think nobody has more of a stake in the reversal in these policies than the African American community does. And they can be the difference makers in a lot of these states.”
For Obama, his historic election was a complex proposition that required a delicate equilibrium: He tried to balance being the president for all Americans while also embracing his African heritage and speaking out about racism. Obama couldn’t be too Black for his white constituents; and he couldn’t be too white for Black supporters.
“There’s no doubt that there’s some folks who just really dislike me because they don’t like the idea of a Black president,” Obama said in 2012. “Now, the flip side of it is there are some Black folks and maybe some white folks who really like me and give me the benefit of the doubt precisely because I’m a Black president.” Obama’s political persona, which was more Dinkins than it was Diggs, made him particularly vulnerable to this type of attack.