Barbara Lee heads for House exit after nearly three decades as trailblazer
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Democrat, 78, who won election to Congress in 1998, departs after storied career with long list of firsts. The Democratic congresswoman Barbara Lee has always stood apart, a matter-of-fact renegade with a long list of firsts. In high school, she was the first Black student to integrate her southern California cheerleading squad. During her more than two decades in Congress, she has been the only Black woman elected to the US House from California’s regions north of Los Angeles.
But it was Lee’s lonely 2001 vote as the only lawmaker against the authorization for the use of US military force against those responsible for the September 11 attacks on New York and Washington that indelibly set her apart. “If you really believe that this is the right thing for the country, for your district, for the world, then you have to do it, and be damned everything else,” Lee told the Associated Press during a recent breakfast interview at the Capitol.
“You don’t do that all the time, but there’s some moments when you have to do that.”. As Lee heads for the exit, wrapping up a storied career representing the Oakland area, the 78-year-old congresswoman once seen as an outlier with deeply unpopular positions – her vote against the war resulted in death threats – has watched her views come to be respected, accepted and even emulated. Casting her final vote on the House floor in late December, Lee was met with applause, her legacy a touchstone for a new generation.
Yet her experiences, including losing a Senate primary in March for a seat later won by a then House colleague, Adam Schiff, in the same year that voters nationwide rejected Kamala Harris for Donald Trump, also provide a stark reminder of the challenges Black women confront in American electoral politics.
