Permanent Interests

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The Expansion, Organization, and Rising Influence of African Americans in Congress, 1971–2007

Introduction

The modern era of African Americans’ nearly 140-year history in Congress began in 1971. Black Members enjoyed a tremendous surge in numbers, at least in the House, reflecting a larger historical process, as minority groups and women exercised their new freedom to participate in American society. Fully 71 percent of all African Americans who have served in Congress entered the House or Senate after 1970.¹ These startling gains derived from the legacy of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 and its subsequent extensions, as well as from Supreme Court decisions requiring legislative redistricting so that black voters could be represented more equitably.

Greater numbers of African-American Members provided renewed momentum for convening a formal group and, in 1971, 13 individuals created the Congressional Black Caucus (CBC).² The CBC became a focal point for addressing issues important to blacks nationally by acting as an advocacy group for African Americans within the institution and forming a potent bloc for pushing legislative items. A growing influence, more focused and forceful than in previous generations, accompanied the organizational trend. The electoral longevity of African-American Members (boosted by districts that were drawn with black majorities), coupled with the CBC’s lobbying of House leaders and progressive institutional reforms in the 1970s, placed many black Members in key committee and party leadership positions. Over time, black advancement within the institution changed Members’ legislative strategies. “Many of the [early] Black Caucus members came out of the heat of the civil rights struggle,” William (Bill) Gray III of Pennsylvania observed. “We have a group of new members whose strategies were shaped in the post-civil rights movement—who use leverage within the system. We see ourselves not as civil rights leaders, but as legislators…the pioneers had made it possible for us to be technicians.”³

The post-1970 generation of black Americans in Congress marked a watershed in American history—a transition from a period of prolonged protest to full political participation. Similar to other minority groups on Capitol Hill entering a stage of institutional maturity, African Americans faced new and sometimes unanticipated challenges resulting from their numerical, organizational, and leadership successes. Redistricting that dramatically boosted the numbers of African-American Members in the early 1990s evoked opposition that sought to roll back or dilute black voting strength. Moreover, by the end of the decade, redistricting had largely run its course in areas where black votes could be concentrated with a goal of electing more African Americans to Congress. The net result was that the number of African Americans in Congress leveled off by the early 1990s and hovered in the high 30s and low 40s for eight election cycles from 1992 through 2006. Although organizational trends provided African-American Members a forum to discuss their legislative agendas and strategies, black Members disagreed about many issues, partially because each Member represented the interests of a unique constituency. Finally, while African-American Members enjoyed unprecedented leadership strength for most of this era, greater power often placed black leaders in a quandary when the imperatives of promoting the leadership or party agenda conflicted with perceived “black interests.”

Background and Precongressional Experience

Like earlier generations of black legislators on Capitol Hill, the 86 African Americans who entered Congress in the period from 1971 through 2007 generally ranked far above the norm in terms of education, professional attainment, and civic achievements. Successful careers in state government propelled the large numbers of African Americans elected to Congress in the 1990s.⁴ Like all the previous generations of black Members, these individuals were typical of their peers among the general membership of the House and Senate—composed largely of business, law, public service, and other professional elites. They were exceedingly well educated, as was the general congressional membership, and their level of education ranked far above the statistical averages for the general U.S. population.⁵ They also largely experienced trends that were prevalent among the general congressional population, including a decline in prior military experience and a higher median age at first election.⁶

Civil Rights Activism

A defining precongressional experience for many in this generation was their shared background in local and national civil rights protests. Many of the Members from this era, especially those first elected in the 1970s and 1980s, came of age during the civil rights movement. Some were prominent figures. John R. Lewis of Georgia (elected in 1986) cofounded and led the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee (SNCC), which became a pillar of the movement—staging sit-ins in segregated stores, participating in the Freedom Rides of 1961, and helping to organize the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom. Andrew Young of Georgia (elected in 1972) was a principal aide to Martin Luther King, Jr., serving as executive director and executive vice president of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference (SCLC). King also tapped a young Washington minister, Walter Fauntroy, as director of the city’s SCLC bureau. As the SCLC’s congressional lobbyist, Fauntroy (elected the District of Columbia’s Delegate in 1971) honed his skills as a coalition-builder.

Early in their political careers, some future black Members of Congress also grappled with internal divisions in the civil rights movement between those who embraced King’s nonviolent protests and those who preferred a more aggressive and militant stance (such as Stokely Carmichael, who succeeded Lewis as head of SNCC).⁷ Out of this schism came the Black Power movement and the more radical black nationalist factions of the latter 1960s, such as the Black Panthers. “Black Power” had different meanings within the movement. For Carmichael’s cohorts, Black Power expressed frustration and rage with intransigent racism and advocated black separatism and the use of violence, if necessary, to achieve a measure of independence for African Americans. Adam Clayton Powell, Jr., of New York, who served in the House in 1966 when Carmichael first employed the term, briefly allied himself with the “new black militants” and defined Black Power as “a new philosophy for the tough, proud young Negroes who categorically refuse to compromise any longer for their rights.”⁸ John Lewis, who resigned from SNCC in July 1966 because of its militancy and confrontational rhetoric, recalled that SNCC had used a similar phrase during the Selma protests but that “it had more to do with self-reliance than with black supremacy.” Lewis added that as articulated by Carmichael, Black Power “tended to create a schism, both within the movement itself and between the races. It drove people apart rather than brought them together.”⁹

Ronald Dellums of California, who represented an Oakland–Berkeley House district, found himself at the center of a virtual war between Black Panthers and the Oakland police force in the late 1960s. “The Black Panther Party for Self Defense” had been formed in 1966 by Huey Newton and Bobby Seale to counter what both men believed to be a long history of police abuses against African-American citizens of Oakland. As a member of the Berkeley city council, Dellums once convinced Seale to disperse an angry, agitated crowd of Panther supporters at a council meeting, probably avoiding bloodshed. Dellums noted that juggling the complex and competing agendas of radical factions developed his political acumen by forcing him “to employ all the skills at my command to build legislative majorities.”¹⁰ A former member of the Chicago Black Panthers, Bobby Rush, who quit the group in the early 1970s because of its violent tactics, served a decade as a Chicago city councilman before winning election to the U.S. House in 1992.

Prior Elective Office

This generation’s elective experience differed significantly from that of previous generations. The vast majority of African Americans who entered Congress after 1970 held prior elective office (68 of the 86, or 79 percent), with a substantial increase in the numbers with service in state legislatures. Half (43) of the African Americans elected to Congress from 1971 through 2007 served as state legislators, 19 in the lower chamber, six in the upper chamber, and 18 in both chambers of their respective statehouses. Of these, several performed leadership functions in their respective chambers, including Barbara Jordan (president pro tempore of the Texas senate), Harold E. Ford, Sr., (majority whip of the Tennessee house of representatives), and Carol Moseley-Braun (assistant majority leader of the Illinois house of representatives).¹¹ This development, perhaps more than any other precongressional characteristic, brought black Members of Congress into near-total congruence with the experiential background of the general population of House and Senate membership.

Voting rights reforms and redistricting drove diversity trends in the state legislatures in the decades after Congress enacted civil rights legislation. For instance, between 1970 and 1992, the number of African Americans serving in state legislatures increased 274 percent (from 168 to 463). The growth occurred fastest in the South—where the largest number of blacks lived and where voting rights legislation and court decisions provided greater access to the ballot. From 32 seats in 1970, blacks held 226 in 1992—a gain of 894 percent.¹² These trends have continued, albeit more slowly, in the last 15 years. According to 2003 figures from the National Conference of State Legislators, 595 African Americans held seats in the upper or lower house in state legislatures, accounting for 8.1 percent of all (7,382) state legislators nationwide.¹³

At the state and the national levels, these gains have been particularly striking among women. Over time, African-American women have accounted for an increasing percentage of the sum total of black legislators in state capitals and in Washington, DC. For instance, in 1970 there were only 15 black women state legislators—accounting for less than 10 percent of all African-American state legislators. By 1992, the number of black women state legislators had increased to 131, or roughly 28 percent of all black state legislators. As with other women in Congress, legislative experience at the state level provided a vehicle for election to the U.S. Congress. In 1971, there was only one African-American woman in Congress—Shirley Chisholm of New York—among a total of 14 blacks in Congress. By late 2007, African-American women accounted for nearly one-third of all the sitting black Members of Congress.¹⁴

State legislatures were just one avenue to attain higher office. Traditional experience in local and municipal elective office also typified this post-1971 cohort of black Members of Congress. Fifteen served on city councils, and five were elected county council members or commissioners. Four persons served as mayors, nine served as local or municipal judges, and several others held other elected positions, such as school board member, recorder of deeds, and justice of the peace. Three individuals held high-ranking state or territorial positions: Mervyn Dymally, lieutenant governor of California; Melvin Evans, governor of the Virgin Islands; and G. K. Butterfield, North Carolina supreme court justice. Finally, several individuals held prominent federal positions prior to winning their first congressional election, including Eleanor Holmes Norton, commissioner of the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission in the 1970s and Diane Watson, U.S. Ambassador to the Federated States of Micronesia from 1999 through 2000.

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Footnotes