For Lee, ‘Truth’ comes out
Documentary explores Oakland congresswoman’s political rise, roots of her fighting spirit
Oakland Rep. Barbara Lee graciously accepts the praise heaped on her by junior colleagues in “Truth to Power: Barbara Lee Speaks for Me,” the documentary by Berkeley filmmaker Abby Ginzberg featuring Democratic Reps. Alexandria OcasioCortez of New York, Lisa Blunt Rochester of Delaware and Ayanna Pressley of Massachusetts, who all acknowledge their debt to the trail Lee blazed.
“She has courage, and she has blazed a trail for all of us,” Blunt Rochester says in the film. “When I decided to run for office, Delaware never had elected a woman in our 230 years. We had never elected a person of color to Congress in our 230 years. To run was really extremely hard, and to have Barbara behind me — beside me — made it possible.
“Barbara Lee was an example, a role model. She represented to me that person who picked herself up and created this incredible position that she has.”
Lee appreciates the compliment, while acknowledging her own debt to the path set for her by the late New York Rep. Shirley Chisholm. And with the documentary making its world premiere as a “sneak preview” on the Jewish Film Institute’s Cinegogue Summer Days during an inperson screening at Concord’s West Wind Solano DriveIn to kick off the film festival on Thursday, July 16, Lee’s 74th birthday, it’s quite the present.
“I’m so happy that they’re here,” Lee tells The Chronicle of her younger allies. “They have stepped up and said, ‘We’re here. We’re here to stay. We’re going to do what’s right and we’ll continue our fight.' ”
Lee’s infectious laughter rings through the phone line, “You know they call me ‘OG’? You know what ‘OG’ is, right?”
“Original Gangster” is an apt definition for a politician who is known for her independent streak, expressed most vividly in 2001 when she was the sole vote in Congress against the Authorization for Use of Military Force Against Terrorists, the post9/11 act that greatly expanded the president’s power to wage war without congressional oversight. Actions like that are among the reasons that Ginzberg pursued Lee as a documentary subject.
“She’s a consummate congresswoman,” Ginzberg says. “She is a public servant more than she is an elected representative. She sees herself as having a real obligation toward her constituents. I felt there was something refreshing and almost unique about that.”
“Truth to Power” charts a singular resume. Lee is a domesticabuse survivor and spent a period of her life
seeking shelter in cheap hotel rooms. (”I didn’t consider myself homeless. I considered it a period when I didn’t have a place to live,” Lee says.) She was an activist with the Black Panthers, worked her way up from intern to become the late Oakland mayor and Rep. Ron Dellums’ chief of staff and served in both the Assembly and the state Senate before her election to the House of Representatives in 1998.
In both the documentary and in conversation, Lee credits her mother, Mildred Adaire — one of 12 students to integrate the University of Texas El Paso in 1955 and the first Black civilian hire at Fort Bliss, Texas — with inspiring her indefatigable drive. Lee’s father was in the Army and often away from home, so Adaire often held down two or three jobs while simultaneously taking care of her three daughters and her father while remaining active in church, the NAACP and other community organizations.
“It was no big deal to her. It was: ‘This is what you do to make life better not only for yourself but for your community,’ ” Lee says. “We grew up knowing we had to get the job done, whatever it was.”
Lee recalls her mother telling her, “‘Barbara, ‘can’t’ isn’t in the dictionary. There is no such word as ‘can’t.’ ” So it never became part of Lee’s lexicon and shaped her determination, as evidenced in “Truth to Power,” which shares both the arc of her life and her legislative accomplishments. Most recently, Lee and Mississippi Rep. Bennie Thompson reintroduced Lee’s 2017 bill to remove Confederate statues from the Capitol, and Lee has also called for the formation of a Truth, Racial Healing and Transformation Commission to address systemic racism.
“Resisting injustice wherever it is and also not going along to get along — that’s what I think my life is about,” Lee says. “It’s been about resisting injustice.”
Originally, “Truth to Power” was scheduled to premiere in April at Oakland’s Grand Lake Theatre during the SFFilm Festival, but the coronavirus scuttled those plans. When the Black Lives Matter protests began in the wake of George Floyd’s death in police custody, Ginzberg started filming again, capturing the moment and Lee’s participation in it.
“This is a film for this moment,” Ginzberg says. “Not only could I not have imagined this moment (of protests and pandemic), there are things in the film I couldn’t have imagined, including the election of 2018. … Being surprised as a documentary filmmaker comes with the territory, but for a film that lets someone who has been a member of Congress as one of the true progressives for over 20 years be heard and be heard in her own voice and go through with the audience what it was like to be a sole ‘no’ vote back in a time when everybody was calling her a traitor and issuing death threats, it’s an enormous opportunity.”
For her part, Lee says, “I think (the film) really does reflect the continuum of why we have to fight.
“I’m a Black woman in America, so you keep on keeping on and still we rise,” she adds, paraphrasing poet Maya Angelou. “It’s all the struggles we go through as Black women, but we still rise. We have to know that we’re going to win — and we’re going to win, because we’re fighting and we’re on the right side of history.”