Barbara Lee heads for House exit after nearly three decades as trailblazer

The Democratic congresswoman Barbara Lee has always stood apart, a matter-of-fact renegade with a long list of firsts.

In high school, she was the first Black student to integrate her southern California cheerleading squad. During her more than two decades in Congress, she has been the only Black woman elected to the US House from California’s regions north of Los Angeles.

But it was Lee’s lonely 2001 vote as the only lawmaker against the authorization for the use of US military force against those responsible for the September 11 attacks on New York and Washington that indelibly set her apart.

“If you really believe that this is the right thing for the country, for your district, for the world, then you have to do it, and be damned everything else,” Lee told the Associated Press during a recent breakfast interview at the Capitol.

“You don’t do that all the time, but there’s some moments when you have to do that.”

As Lee heads for the exit, wrapping up a storied career representing the Oakland area, the 78-year-old congresswoman once seen as an outlier with deeply unpopular positions – her vote against the war resulted in death threats – has watched her views come to be respected, accepted and even emulated. Casting her final vote on the House floor in late December, Lee was met with applause, her legacy a touchstone for a new generation.

Yet her experiences, including losing a Senate primary in March for a seat later won by a then House colleague, Adam Schiff, in the same year that voters nationwide rejected Kamala Harris for Donald Trump, also provide a stark reminder of the challenges Black women confront in American electoral politics.

“There are few congressional leaders, public servants, that have served with the kind of courage and tenacity as congresswoman Lee,” said outgoing US Senator Laphonza Butler, the California Democrat who was appointed temporarily to the seat after the death of long-serving Democratic senator Dianne Feinstein.

With Butler, Lee teamed up to pass one of the final bills of the 118th Congress, awarding the Congressional Gold Medal posthumously to her mentor and friend Shirley Chisholm, another trailblazer as the first Black woman elected to Congress, joining in 1969, who went on to make a longshot presidential run, on what would have been the New York Democrat’s 100th birthday. It was approved by the House and Senate without opposition, and signed into law by Joe Biden.

A single mother and social worker by training, Lee had been disconnected from politics. She was a volunteer community worker with the Black Panther party when she met Chisholm. Lee found in “Mrs C” a new kind of leader who “stood up for people.” Lee got involved in Chisholm’s 1972 presidential campaign. Lee eventually worked in Congress and ran for office herself, taking over the seat in 1998 after her boss, Ron Dellums, retired.

But as Lee tells it, what’s particularly noteworthy about her own career, is that she’s number 20, just the 20th Black woman in US history elected to the House.

“I’m only the 20th one!” she said. “Can you imagine that? I mean, that’s pretty scary. Black women haven’t had their voices and their perspectives and their experiences reflected in the policies.”

Over and over, she has stories of being among the only Black women at the table – most prominently when she and others pushed Republican George W Bush as president to launch the President’s Emergency Plan for Aids Relief (Pepfar) to fight global HIV/Aids It’s an effort that continues to this day.

Similarly, she was an early critic of the Hyde amendment, which prohibits federal funds for abortion services with few exceptions in the cases of rape, incest or if the pregnancy endangers the life of the pregnant person. Lee views it as discriminatory against low-income women who rely on federal healthcare. Hers was a once rare position that has since gained wider support.

“I’ve been at tables all these years by myself, which meant I had to form allies and alliances to be effective,” she said, “which I did”.

She explains that as a Black woman, she brings a perspective that is often lost on others, going through life with “antennae” that sense what’s going on “because of our history.”

Lee’s antennae were definitely picking up signals on the eve of January 6 2021, amid the chatter of far-right groups coming to Washington.

“I wore tennis shoes to work that day,” she said.

When the mob of Trump supporters stormed the US Capitol and she and other lawmakers were fumbling to put on their gas masks and evacuate the House chamber, she remembers how the House chaplain rose and started praying.

“I said: ‘Oh, Lord. This is serious. We got to start praying, too’,” she said. Those sneakers “came in handy”.

Two decades earlier she agonized over her choice to vote against war on Afghanistan and beyond. Standing alone against fierce hostility in the chamber.

She has since built a coalition, including with hard-right Republicans opposed to overseas military action.

“She’s always dreamed big, she’s always been bold, she’s always had a strength of conviction, and she’s very strategic,” said congresswoman Ayanna Pressley of Massachusetts.

Younger lawmakers often affectionately call Lee “OG” – original gangster.

Lee notes there are now several dozen Black women elected to the House, an improvement but, she said, still not enough to catch up for the nation’s 200-plus-year history.

“My mother told me that ‘can’t’ is not in the dictionary,” she said. “Shirley Chisholm encouraged me to shake things up, not to go along to get along.”