U.S.
Representative Ayanna Pressley (1974- ), politician. Ayanna Soyini Pressley was born in Cincinnati and
grew up on the north side of Chicago. Her father was largely absent from her
childhood due to legal and addiction struggles, but her mother worked multiple
jobs while also fighting for tenants’ rights as a community organizer and
cultivating Pressley’s interest in politics by taking her into the voting booth
for every election. Pressley attended Francis W. Parker School, where she was
on the debate team, served as commencement speaker, and was voted “most likely
to be mayor of Chicago.” She studied at Boston University for two years but
then had to withdraw to financially support her mother. One of her jobs
included an internship with U.S. Representative Joseph P. Kennedy II, helping
senior citizens, veterans, and disabled persons with Social Security claims. She
later became his scheduler and constituency director before moving to the staff
of U.S. Senator John Kerry, working as his political director. That same year
she became a candidate for public office for the first time, seeking an
at-large seat on the Boston City Council. She was the only woman among fifteen
candidates, and her victory made her the first woman of color to ever serve on
the Council. She was later reelected four times by wide margins. In her nine
years on the Council, Pressley helped to develop a new sex education and health
curriculum for public schools, advocated for reform in liquor licensing, and formed
a committee to combat child abuse, domestic abuse, and human trafficking. This
latter work and her partnership with the Boston Area Rape Crisis Center was
motivated in part by having survived a sexual assault when she was a college
student; in her words, “I just wanted to put a face to the issue for the
millions of women who suffer in silence.”
In 2018 Pressley ran for a seat in the U.S.
House of Representatives, seeking election in Massachusetts’ 7th
Congressional District, which includes most of Boston and is the only one in
the state where most of the residents are people of color. In one debate she
declared “I happen to be black and a woman and unapologetically proud to be
both. But that is not the totality of my identity. But I’m not going to pretend
that representation doesn’t matter…it matters because it informs the issues
that are spotlighted and emphasized and leads to more innovative solutions. You
cannot have a government by and for the people if it is not represented by all
of the people.” Despite being a political newcomer going up against an
established politician who had represented the district for twenty years, she
won the primary by a wide margin, in part because of many new Latinx and
Asian-American voters who had not voted in previous primaries. The Republican
Party decided not to even field a candidate against her (it had not done so in
her district since 1998), and so in November 2018 she won the general election
unopposed. This made Pressley the first black woman ever elected to Congress
from Massachusetts and one of only two from any New England state. She was part
of a national wave in which anti-Trump sentiment led to a record number of
victories for women and racial, religious, and sexual minorities, including several
other races where liberal white male Democrats were replaced by even more
progressive minority women. In her victory speech she stated “Tonight in
Massachusetts and across the country, we are standing in our power, the same
power that my mother told me we had, the same power that compelled me to raise
my head and to not ask permission to lead…When those tectonic plates of
revolution shift below our feet, when our communities deserve and these times
require bold vision, activist leadership, a movement builds, and a citizen
activist rises, and they are a force to be reckoned with.”
Upon taking
office in January 2019, Pressley was appointed the Committee on Financial
Services, which oversees banks and other segments of the financial services
industry, and the Committee on Oversight and Reform, which is the House’s main
investigative committee. She also co-founded “The Squad,” an unofficial group
which consists of Pressley and three other new representatives: Ilhan Omar of
Minnesota, who moved from Somalia to Minnesota as a teenager and became the
first African-born member of Congress; Rashida Tlaib, who was born in Michigan
to Palestinian immigrants and along with Omar was the first ever Muslim female
congresswoman; and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a New Yorker of Puerto Rican
descent. The Squad gained a great deal of media attention due to its diverse
composition, young age (the nickname itself came from hip hop culture) and liberal
politics. Pressley proposed legislation that would lower the voting age to
sixteen, but this failed in part because some Democrats voted against it. She
also co-sponsored a bill to expand Medicaid coverage for pregnant women and
another bill to combat sexual harassment in the workplace and abolish the
tipped minimum wage. The Squad also endorsed Medicare expansion, fighting climate change and economic
inequality through massive government spending (known as the “Green Deal”), abolishing
the U.S. Immigrations and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agency that had become
notorious for its treatment of immigrant communities and asylum seekers, and
impeaching Trump. During a government shutdown caused by the president’s
insistence on funding for a border wall, Pressley took the House floor to tell him “You devalue the life of the immigrant, the
worker and the survivor. I see right through you and so do the American
people…Today I rise as one and I stand as thousands.”
These and
other actions sometimes put Pressley and the Squad at odds with the more
moderate leadership of the Democratic party. In July 2019 Trump stepped into
this internal debate and both voiced and amplified the feelings of his base,
tweeting “So interesting to see ‘progressive’ Democrat congresswomen, who
originally came from countries whose governments are a complete and total
catastrophe…now loudly and viciously telling the people of the United States,
the greatest and most powerful Nation on earth, how our government is to be
run. Why don’t they go back and help fix the totally broken and crime infested
places from which they came?” This tweet and subsequent actions by Trump and
his supporters gained massive international criticism, including from many who
did not support the Squad’s politics. It was frequently noted that three of the
four lawmakers were born in the United States and that Pressley in particular,
as the descendant of black slaves, came from a family that had been in the
country far longer than Trump’s. In one of her several personal responses, she
declared “I’m proud to be an American. I love this country. I challenge it
because I want it to live up to its ideals and its promises that it espouses,
and I do that from a place of love.” She also gave the official response by the
Squad, stating “we are grateful for your solidarity, your encouragement and
your support in the face of the most recent xenophobic, bigoted remarks from
the occupant of our White House. I will always refer to him as the occupant as
he is only occupying space. He does not embody the grace, the empathy, the
compassion, the integrity that that office requires and that the American
people deserve. That being said, I encourage the American people and all of us
in this room and beyond to not take the bait. This is a disruptive distraction
from the issues of care, concern, and consequence to the American people that
we were sent here with a decisive mandate from our constituents to work on…Our
squad is big. Our squad includes any person committed to building more
equitable and just world, and that is the work that we want to get back to. And
given the size of this squad, and this great nation, we cannot, we will not, be
silenced.”
©David Brodnax, Sr.
