For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Politics

By Donna Brazile, Yolanda Caraway, Leah Daughtry and 2 more

“For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Politics. It’s a wonderful, necessary book.”
– Hillary Clinton

The four most powerful African American women in politics share the story of their friendship and how it has changed politics in America.

The lives of black women in American politics are remarkably absent from the shelves of bookstores and libraries. For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Politics is a sweeping view of American history from the vantage points of four women who have lived and worked behind the scenes in politics for over thirty years—Donna Brazile, Yolanda Caraway, Leah Daughtry, and Minyon Moore—a group of women who call themselves The Colored Girls. Like many people who have spent their careers in public service, they view their lives in four-year waves where presidential campaigns and elections have been common threads. For most of the Colored Girls, their story starts with Jesse Jackson’s first campaign for president. From there, they went on to work on the presidential campaigns of Walter Mondale, Michael Dukakis, Bill Clinton, Al Gore, Barack Obama and Hillary Rodham Clinton.

Over the years, they’ve filled many roles: in the corporate world, on campaigns, in unions, in churches, in their own businesses and in the White House. Through all of this, they’ve worked with those who have shaped our country’s history—US Presidents such as Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, well-known political figures such as Terry McAuliffe and Howard Dean, and legendary activists and historical figures such as Jesse Jackson, Coretta Scott King, and Betty Shabazz.

For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Politics is filled with personal stories that bring to life heroic figures we all know and introduce us to some of those who’ve worked behind the scenes but are still hidden. Whatever their perch, the Colored Girls are always focused on the larger goal of “hurrying history” so that every American — regardless of race, gender or religious background — can have a seat at the table. This is their story.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Macmillan Publishers
• Release date: Oct 2, 2018
• ISBN: 9781250137722

Donna Brazile

Donna Brazile is a senior political strategist and former campaign manager for Gore-Lieberman 2000 -- the first African American to lead a major presidential campaign. She is currently chair of the Democratic National Committee's Voting Rights Institute and an adjunct professor at Georgetown University.

Book preview

1

A Call to Serve

In the summer of 1964, Rochester, New York, was still a gleaming destination of the Great Migration. Eastman Kodak was there, and by the middle of the decade, Kodak had been joined by big companies such as Xerox and Bausch and Lomb. It was the kind of city that epitomized the hope of the Great Migration: where any hardworking black person who aspired to could get a good job. Yolanda Caraway was a long-legged, beautiful teenager with hair that swung like a Supreme’s and a brain that held facts and figures like a human computer. Hers was a community of have-somes, and her ambitions matched the achievements of the men and women around her. She was inspired by the Freedom Riders and remembers that by the time she attended high school, she had only one ambition: to help people. She toyed with the idea of being a social worker, but medicine called her, too. Her best friend’s aunt was a doctor. That same friend, Anne Micheaux, had a grandfather who was a doctor, too, the black doctor in their town.

The year she turned fourteen, Yolanda got a summer job as a candy striper at St. Mary’s Hospital, the very same hospital where she had drawn her first breath. Years later, she would admit, I think I was really attracted to the cute little candy-striped dresses. The boys seemed to really like them—and I liked that. But things did not work out the way she planned. She flunked algebra and needed to retake the course to get a passing grade. Yolanda went to summer school in the morning. Then, at noon, she went to St. Mary’s with her girlfriend Delores Leach—who did become a nurse. Life in the hospital was not as glamorous as Yolanda had imagined. She spent her afternoons emptying bedpans, running errands for doctors, checking people into the emergency room, and cleaning up all manner of vomit and excrement. It took me about two weeks to realize that I was definitely not cut out for that, she says. The first time some very bloody person was wheeled in—I was out. Never could take the sight of blood, even on myself. There was more blood than usual in Rochester that summer. A case of police brutality had ignited the city’s first race riots, and angry protestors had taken to the streets. Yolanda didn’t know it at the time, but the influence of that event—so close to home, and prompting feelings of injustice and frustration—would tilt her attention toward politics.

*   *   *

It was Freedom Summer, 1964. Lyndon B. Johnson had become president after the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. The hope and potential of the modern civil rights movement hung in the balance. In June 1964, a coalition of four branches of the movement gathered with the united purpose of registering as many African American voters as humanly possible. They were SNCC, Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, the young people’s wing of the movement; CORE, Congress of Racial Equality; SCLC, Southern Christian Leadership Conference; and the NAACP, National Association for the Advancement of Colored People, the more than fifty-year-old organization started by W. E. B. Du Bois, Mary White Ovington, and Moorfield Storey.

Over the course of the ten-week nonviolent initiative, the Ku Klux Klan and organizations such as the white supremacist Citizens’ Council brought down a reign of terror on the volunteers. They used every tool at their disposal as members of the white Southern elite: volunteers were beaten and murdered; evicted from their homes and fired from their jobs; intimidated, arrested, and harassed. Dozens of black churches and homes were bombed and burned. Fannie Lou Hamer, a former sharecropper, was so powerful in her testimony before the credentials committee of the DNC that summer that President Johnson called a press conference to divert the television cameras from her story. She wanted the right to vote, she told the committee members. Voting was what stood between her current status and the right to become a first-class citizen. With all the death and destruction being rained down upon nonviolent volunteers who were simply trying to get people to the ballots, Hamer let the country know, I question America.

*   *   *

That fall, when Yolanda started the ninth grade, a friend asked if she wanted to volunteer to work on Bobby Kennedy’s Senate campaign. President Kennedy had been assassinated just the year before, and his younger brother Robert had left the administration and moved to New York to be able to run for Senate. Yolanda can still remember her excitement at the invitation: "Well, all black people loved JFK and were devastated by his murder; so of course we loved his brother Bobby. I was always looking for something to do after school so I didn’t have to go home; I was happy to have somewhere to go."

Yolanda was the youngest and only child of her mother’s second marriage. As the only kid at home, she remembers bearing the brunt of her mother’s unhappiness, which made me a very confused and unhappy kid. But her father balanced the scales: I simply adored my father, who was just the opposite. He was loving and affectionate, kind and funny, and very handsome. Each parent had other daughters from a previous marriage.

Every day after school, she’d take the bus from East High School all the way to the west side of town to volunteer on Bobby Kennedy’s campaign. It was the first time she had ever done anything like that. She’d type letters, make calls, answer phones, stuff envelopes. The work was just as lowly as being a candy striper, but it had a far different effect on Yolanda. She remembers feeling as if she had come alive. In the campaign offices, she had an up-close and daily history lesson about the slain president’s brother and his family. When campaign staffers discussed Bobby’s platform, Yolanda understood that they were trying to communicate the goals and governing style that would guide the candidate’s tenure should he be elected. "For the first time in my very young life, I really began to understand how important those people were who were leaders. I began to see this was another important way to help people.

By the end of the campaign, I was knocking on doors after school, explaining to people why they should vote for Bobby Kennedy. To my own teenage surprise, I sounded like I knew what the hell I was talking about. Bobby won that election, and Yolanda was confident she felt every bit as triumphant as he did. For her service, she received a thank-you letter signed by Senator Kennedy. Knowing, even decades later, that the letter might well have been signed by a secretary using a signature stamp didn’t diminish the impact of the gift. The letter hangs on her office wall to this day.

Yolanda had been bitten by a bug she wasn’t aware existed and didn’t yet fully understand, but politics would come to be a part of her, what she would describe as one of the great passions of her life. As she grew older and gained more experience, she discovered that it was a mutual love affair: she had a gift for management, for parsing complex political issues and communicating their importance to voters. She had great political instincts. Bobby Kennedy was the first inspiring candidate she backed, but he was far from her last.

That August, during that candy striper summer and right before my fifteenth birthday, I went to Baltimore to visit with my sister Dorothy and my brother-in-law, a minister named Wendell Phillips, and their one-year-old son, Wendell, aka Poo. I was what was then called a ‘change of life baby.’ There was a sixteen-year difference between Dorothy and me. When Dorothy got married, I was only ten years old. While Yolanda was often estranged from her mother, she was inextricably close to her big sister. Wendell, in turn, became the big brother she’d always longed for but had never had.

The visit to Baltimore made it one of the best summers ever. Yolanda remembers, Wendell had a very active youth fellowship at his church, Heritage United Church of Christ, and I made so many new friends. I absolutely loved Baltimore. Well, I probably would have loved anyplace other than Rochester, but I remember telling my parents, ‘I’ve never seen so many colored people in my life.’ I didn’t want to go home. So, I stayed.

Politics became a natural, intrinsic part of Yolanda’s life in Baltimore, too. Wendell was a well-known activist in the city, and a key player in every election. Yolanda, now in her early twenties, volunteered for every candidate Wendell backed. In the late seventies, Wendell ran for state delegate and won. Still in her twenties, Yolanda ran his Annapolis office. The visibility of that position led to her supporting and campaigning for Ted Kennedy in the Democratic primary against the incumbent president, Jimmy Carter. As part of the senator’s on-the-ground Baltimore team, Yolanda organized a church event for Kennedy. And it was in that church basement where she first met Ron Brown, one of Senator Kennedy’s deputies. Brown would later become the first African American chairman of the Democratic National Committee and U.S. secretary of commerce. But more than that, he became Yolanda’s good friend and other big brother.

That church basement event proved to be the site of many firsts for Yolanda. Maria Shriver attended the event with her Uncle Teddy. One of Maria’s close friends, a local TV journalist named Oprah Winfrey, came by to see her—Yolanda remembers the two women screaming and hugging like two teenagers; you could see how close they were. Once Yolanda got her own place in Baltimore, she began to throw parties at her apartment. Winfrey, the new anchor at WBAL, came to one of them with Sue Simmons, also a news anchor. Yolanda remembers Winfrey as a little shy, "but it was right after she’d moved to town, and she probably didn’t know many