LEADING THE FIGHT
As Congress pays tribute to Rep. John Lewis, a new generation looks to pick up the torch
Maureen Groppe and Nicholas Wu
WASHINGTON – Black representation in Congress has more than doubled since the late Rep. John Lewis was first elected in 1986 after years of fighting for equality.
While Congress is still less diverse than the electorate it represents, Lewis, D-Ga., helped clear the path for others to follow.
Lewis put his life on the line for future generations through sit-ins at lunch counters, voter registration drives and his walk across the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma in 1965 that left him with a fractured skull. The walk, known as Bloody Sunday, helped galvanize support for the Voting Rights Act and the civil rights movement.
The group of candidates running for Congress in 2020 is the most diverse in recent memory, according
to the nonpartisan Center for Responsive Politics.
As of mid-June, 116 candidates who are Black, Indigenous, and people of color (BIPOC) made it through nominating contests and will be on the fall ballot, according to the center. But because incumbents usually win congressional races, BIPOC candidates could be elected to seats currently held by white lawmakers in only a small share of contests, the center estimates.
The hopefuls include up-and-coming leaders who may share Lewis’ commitment to justice and equality but will be making their own mark.
“It’s a new generation,” said Wendy Davis, a member of the Democratic National Committee from Georgia. “And it’s a generation that has new tools to face those obstacles.”
Here’s a look at four of the Black candidates favored to win their general election races who are already getting national attention.
Nikema Williams
Nikema Williams’ great aunt was the first Black student admitted to the University of Atlanta.
Her husband was an aide to Lewis. Their young son, Carter, is named after the 39th president.
She called herself “a student of the John Lewis school of politics.”
Williams, 41, the Georgia state senator picked by state Democrats as their nominee to succeed Lewis in Congress next year, has ties that run deep to the civil rights movement and Democratic Party.
She also has her own extensive record of activism and leadership.
The first Black woman to head the Georgia Democratic Party, Williams worked her way up the ranks while advocating for reproductive rights at the southeast chapter of Planned Parenthood and for the rights of workers in her current job. She is deputy political director at the National Domestic Workers Alliance and deputy director of the alliance’s advocacy and political arm.
Williams used the word “fight” or “fighter” more than once a minute as she made her candidacy pitch to the party committee that voted overwhelmingly, after Lewis’ death, to make her the replacement nominee for the fall ballot.
Williams addressed her fellow Democrats as her “co-conspirators for justice.”
Members of the committee described Williams as someone who would be able to “hit the ground running” in Washington and who has a winning combination of activism and legislative experience.
Williams is all but assured to win the general election in Lewis’ old district, one of the most heavily Democratic in the South.
Like Lewis, Williams grew up on a farm in Alabama, not far from the town in Georgia where she was born. Williams was raised by her grandparents in a home without indoor plumbing or running water.
Riding around in the back of her grandfather’s pickup truck before elections, Williams distributed slate cards urging neighbors to vote for specific candidates. Her textbooks told the story of the integration of the University of Alabama by her great aunt, Autherine Lucy, in 1956.
“This ingrained into me a sense of standing up to injustice and demanding equal and fair treatment,” she said in her candidacy pitch.
In high school, Williams joined the United Food and Commercial Workers International Union while working as a cashier at Food World.
After graduating with a biology degree from Talladega College, a historically Black college where she was a member of the Alpha Kappa Alpha sorority, Williams moved to Atlanta in 2002 and quickly got involved in the Democratic Party.
“For a while, the state party really didn’t feel like a state party. It was centered around metropolitan areas,” Georgia Democratic Party member Bobby Fuse said of the positive influence Williams had when she eventually rose to the top and increased party participation. “She has a great grasp of the entire state of Georgia.”
In addition to her role at the state level, Williams also worked her way up to the executive committee of the national party. She was a fundraiser for Barack Obama’s 2012 campaign and a convention delegate for both Obama and Hillary Clinton.
“Nikema is someone who fights for the causes she believes in and doesn’t hesitate to do the work,” said Democratic National Committee member Davis, who has worked closely with Williams at the state party for years.
Davis said Williams is the most successful leader of the state party in the past three decades.
“There are a lot of people who talk and there’s some people who work behind the scenes,” Davis said. “She has this wonderful capacity to be both that person you’re happy to be standing in front of a camera representing your party, and also the person who does the work.”
Elected to the state Senate in 2017, Williams has battled Republicans on abortion and voting rights, school vouchers, health care and other issues.
After campaigning hard for gubernatorial candidate Stacey Abrams in 2018, Williams was arrested in the Capitol building when she went to check on constituents who were protesting the outcome. The charges were later dropped.
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution called Williams a protégé of Abrams who has a “knack for taking the fight to the GOP.”
Noting that she’s also been willing to work with Republicans, the paper quoted a congratulatory note to Williams from the top aide of Georgia’s lieutenant governor.
“You have always been an honest broker,” John Porter wrote, “and I have no doubt you’ll continue to do the same in D.C.”
Davis said Williams understands that there are some issues on which you don’t waver and others where you work to find common ground.
“And I think that’s a quality she shares with Congressman Lewis,” Davis said. “I think people need to not underestimate her.”
Trio of new lawmakers in New York
A new generation of Black leaders are likely to sweep into office in New York, among them two candidates who are likely to be the first two openly gay Black members of Congress.
Mondaire Jones and Ritchie Torres are succeeding longtime, retiring incumbents, and the third, Jamaal Bowman, a former middle-school principal from the Bronx, unseated Rep. Eliot Engel, the powerful chair of the House Foreign Affairs Committee.
All three candidates will face only token opposition for the deep-blue districts in November.
And once they get to Washington, they all say they aim to make “good trouble.”
Jamaal Bowman
Bowman’s Justice Democrat-backed win over Engel in New York’s 16th Congressional District in southern Westchester County and the northern Bronx was one of the largest upsets so far in the 2020 primary elections.
The politics of the primary election had pitted Lewis against Bowman, in some respects. Lewis and the Congressional Black Caucus had endorsed Engel over Bowman in the primary. Bowman, however, did not hold hard feelings.
“They didn’t know who I was,” Bowman said, noting the Congressional Black Caucus’ longstanding ties with Engel. “I wouldn’t want them to endorse me just because I’m a Black candidate.”
Regardless of the politics of the primary, Bowman said he was inspired by Lewis’ legacy of nonviolent protest and continual agitation for change.
“John Lewis was arrested over 40 times. He was beaten mercilessly, multiple times, receiving a skull fracture and a concussion. And he kept going,” Bowman said. “He didn’t stop after the
Voting Rights Act, the Civil Rights Act was signed into law”
“As a Black man in America,” Bowman explained, he looked up to Lewis, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and history “as a guide to how you’re supposed to conduct yourself within a country of white supremacy.”
And now, to look forward to walking the same halls as Lewis, it was a “surreal experience.”
Ritchie Torres
Torres and Jones would not have a chance as Black candidates if not for the example Lewis had set for young candidates, Torres said.
“He’s one of the few heroes I see in American politics,” Torres said. “He’s larger than the office.”
He said he and Mondaire Jones were “the beneficiaries of the progress that John Lewis fought for the rest of us. He risked his life so the rest of us could have a fighting chance.”
Torres, a New York City councilman, is likely to succeed Rep. José Serrano in New York’s 15th Congressional District in the Bronx.
“Good trouble” summed up the current national political mood as young people like him, inspired by Lewis, ran for office and won against older, more entrenched politicians, Torres said.
After all, Lewis was the youngest of the “Big Six” civil rights leaders, Torres noted.
Torres took on established rules in Congress even before arriving on Capitol Hill.
In a Washington Post op-ed and comments reported first by Newsweek, Torres said he wanted to join both the Congressional Black Caucus and Congressional Hispanic Caucus despite longstanding Black Caucus rules preventing members of Congress from being a member of both.
“Expecting Afro-Latinos like myself to be politically alienated from our own blackness – at a time when Black Lives Matter has become the rallying cry of a racially awakened nation – is the cruelest of ironies,” Torres wrote in The Washington Post.
Mondaire Jones
Jones, an attorney and a former Obama administration official, never thought he could run for elected office.
He ruled out elected office for most of his life, he said, because “I didn’t think that I could be successful in electoral politics as an openly gay candidate.”
Jones recalled meeting Lewis at a Congressional Black Caucus event in 2012, and being in “awe” at interacting with a “giant among men.”
They talked about Jones’ representative in Congress, who at the time was Eliot Engel, and Jones told Lewis he intended to go into politics one day.
Now, he and Ritchie Torres were “making history” as the first openly gay Black members of Congress. I think we need to qualify this because they haven’t won yet.
“It is an awesome responsibility,” he said. “One that I accept, with great humility.”
Jones, who was endorsed by progressives like Sens. Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders, is set to succeed Rep. Nita Lowey, D-N.Y., the retiring chair of the House Appropriations Committee.
The fact he could win the district, New York’s 17th, which includes the affluent New York suburbs in Westchester County, as a Black gay man and a progressive was a “sign of progress,” he said.
“We don’t have a large DSA (Democratic Socialists of America) chapter here,” Jones noted.
Jones said Lewis’ legacy was one of “going up against the political establishment at the time.” He noted how Lewis’ speech at the March on Washington was a “radical first draft” and was changed at the last minute.
“It referred to the fact that Black people in America are constantly told to wait patiently for progress, but justice delayed is unacceptable in a civilized society, and he spoke with a sense of urgency,” Jones said.