On Election Day, Representative Barbara Lee, a California Democrat, joined some two dozen Black women outside a polling place in Prince George’s County, Md., to celebrate the rise of Vice President Kamala Harris.
The ebullient group included Angela Alsobrooks, who later that day became one of two African American women elected to the U.S. Senate, which has never had more than one Black woman serving at a time. Dawn Moore, the first lady of Maryland, was there too, as was the mayor of Bladensburg, Takisha James, and members of the Town Council, all of whom are Black women.
As the group gathered for a photo, an onlooker called out, “Black girl magic, right there!”
The enchantment evaporated that evening, as Ms. Lee, still wearing a T-shirt with Ms. Harris’s image and the slogan “It’s Time,” stood in a thinning crowd at the vice president’s victory party at Howard University. She had brought her grandson to witness history. Instead they left with “tears in our eyes,” she said.
The loss was deeply personal for Ms. Lee, 78, a liberal icon and the highest-ranking Black woman in the House leadership, whose first political job was working on Shirley Chisholm’s pathbreaking presidential campaign in 1972. Elected to Congress in 1998 from the same Oakland district where Ms. Harris grew up, Ms. Lee suffered a dismal primary loss in the race this year to fill the Senate seat vacated by the death of Senator Dianne Feinstein.
The victor was Representative Adam Schiff, the California Democrat and favorite of Nancy Pelosi and the party’s establishment. Men now occupy both Senate seats in California (the other is Senator Alex Padilla), which for three decades had been America’s only state with two female senators. Campaigning across the country for Ms. Harris, Ms. Lee had hoped to work in her administration.
Now she is packing up her Capitol office, and will soon return home. She has been floated as a potential candidate for Oakland mayor, but for now her future remains undecided.
On Friday night, Ms. Lee held her final district town hall, welcoming her successor, Lateefah Simon, a Bay Area Rapid Transit board member.
In an interview over the long weekend, Ms. Lee said she was “ecstatic about having two Black women in the U.S. Senate,” but that the presidential result made her angry, and filled her with questions.
Why had so many women, particularly white women, rejected Ms. Harris? What is the lesson for children in a man who escapes punishment for crimes by being elected president?
“You know the five stages of grief,” she said. “Well, getting to that acceptance stage is hard.”
Advice From Chisholm
Ms. Lee experienced segregation firsthand growing up in the 1940s and 1950s in El Paso, where she attended Catholic elementary school, the only school system that would enroll Black children at the time. Ms. Lee and a younger sister were the only African American Girl Scouts in their troop.
The daughter of an Army lieutenant colonel and a mother who ran their household finances, Ms. Lee eventually moved with her mother and sisters to Los Angeles. After two children and a failed marriage of her own, she eventually enrolled in Mills College, then an all-female school. Her first experience in activism was as an early member of the Black Panthers, including raising money for the unsuccessful Oakland mayoral campaign of the Panthers co-founder Bobby Seale.
Ms. Lee led Mills College’s Black Student Union. In 1972 she extended a speaking invitation to Representative Shirley Chisholm, Democrat of New York, who in 1968 had become the first African American woman elected to Congress.
Ms. Chisholm took her up on it, and gave her some advice that changed her life.
“I had a big Afro, two kids, I was a returning student,” Ms. Lee recalled. “And she asked me, ‘Little girl, are you registered to vote?’”
No, Ms. Lee told her. “I don’t believe in politics. It’s not doing anything for my life.”
Ms. Chisholm chided her: “If you’re not involved, others are going to make decisions for you,” Ms. Lee recalled.
She registered; joined Ms. Chisholm’s presidential campaign; served as a California delegate at the 1972 Democratic National Convention in Miami; earned a master’s degree in social work from the University of California, Berkeley; and continued working at the Community Health Alliance for Neighborhood Growth and Education, or CHANGE, which she founded while still a grad student to provide poor people with mental health services.
It was through Ms. Chisholm that Ms. Lee met Ronald V. Dellums, a longtime Democratic House member from California, who hired her as an intern at $1 an hour. One day in Washington, she was one of a handful of Black interns attending a meeting with Mr. Dellums and Senator Edward M. Kennedy.
During a break, “I got up and so boldly asked the senator, ‘Would you meet with the Black interns?’” Ms. Lee recalled. “‘Our families love you. You’re our hero. But we want to talk to you ourselves.’”
To her surprise, Mr. Kennedy agreed. “He said he was fighting for us,” Ms. Lee recalled, but what she remembers most is thinking, “‘OK, this is how power works. You have to speak up.’”
Ms. Lee returned to California in 1987, won seats in the State Legislature, and by 1998 had won a special election for the seat held by Mr. Dellums, her old boss.
In Congress, a Progressive ‘O.G.’
In the House Ms. Lee has worked to advance L.G.B.T. rights and monitor Pentagon spending. As founder and co-chairwoman of the Congressional H.I.V./AIDS Caucus, she led work on every major piece of H.I.V./AIDS legislation passed during her tenure, including President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief, or PEPFAR, which President George W. Bush signed in 2003 and the government estimates has saved 25 million lives.
After the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, Ms. Lee was the sole member in both chambers to vote against Congress’s authorization for the use of military force, declaring, “Let us not become the evil that we deplore.” Her stance prompted a flood of death threats, and the Capitol Police assigned her a 24-hour security detail.
During the Biden administration, Ms. Lee helped free up $322 million through the Inflation Reduction Act for a zero-emissions transition at the Port of Oakland. On Saturday she said she was puzzled by how many Californians who benefited rejected Ms. Harris.
As the highest-ranking African American woman in Democratic House leadership, Ms. Lee is a mentor to newer progressives and the Congressional Black Caucus, some of whom call her the “O.G.,” or original gangster.
When they tell her they are tired of constant partisan battles, “I remind them of the song that we sing as Black people,” she said, called “Can’t Give Up Now.” Its verses include “Nobody told me the road would be easy. And I don’t believe he’s brought me this far to leave me.”
Ms. Lee met Ms. Harris while serving in state government, and the two women grew closer after Ms. Harris entered the U.S. Senate in 2017 and then ran for president in 2019. Ms. Lee was the first person Ms. Harris called when she dropped out of the presidential primary that year.
“I was on the train, going from D.C. to New York,” Ms Lee said. “And she explained, ‘You know, the money just wasn’t there.’” Ms. Lee told her, “It’s OK. You’ll be president one day.”
In her Senate campaign, Ms. Lee also struggled with a lack of money. But she knows that was not the only reason she lost: In California as elsewhere, the results suggest voters have grown less receptive to progressive causes.
“At the end of the day, this is a wake-up call,” she said. “As someone who has been in resistance movements before, as someone who wants to see peace and justice in the world, I’m not going to turn my back.”
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