Where Race Meets Politics

Two images mark the rise and fall of Yvonne Braithwaite Burke's political career. The first published in Time magazine in 1977, heralded Burke as one of 200 of America's most promising future leaders. By that time, the then 44-year-old legislator had served three terms in the California Assembly, had vice-chaired the 1972 Democratic National Convention, and had been the first woman in 20 years and the first Black woman ever to be elected to the House of Representatives from her state.

A second picture appeared three years later, on a campaign flyer mailed to residents throughout Los Angeles' fourth county district only days before the April 1980 election Burke's opponent for the position of L.A. county supervisor had spent $100,000 having the xeroxed photograph distributed and labeled the picture with the blunt question. "Would you vote for this person." Unable to respond to the blatantly racist ploy, Burke lost the race and withdrew from elective politics at together.

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Before 1966, when Yvonne Burke was elected to her first term on the California Assembly, the University of Southern California Law School graduate had given little consideration to a career in politics. Having spent the previous 10 years as a practicing attorney, she was working on the staff of the McCone Commission, a temporary body charged with investigating the Watts Riots. In spired by the commission's goals she and several other staffers decided to strike out on the campaign trail.

At first Burke thought she was vying for a part-time position, but that year California passed a law making the legislature full time. Burke give up her legal career to serve the state but recalls that her new commitment still put tremendous stress on her family life. The pressure only became worse when six years later Burke was elected to the U.S. House of Representative. She and her two-year-old daughter commuted weekly between Washington and L.A.

The personal strain eventually forced Burke abandon her congressional post. When her daughter entered first grade and could no longer make the trip to and from the capital. Burke returned to California and state politics Back home, she encountered a general surge of conservatism, per sonified by Howard M. Jarvis and his successful campaign for the tax-slashing Proposition 13. The controversial Bakke affirmative action debate stirred widespread racism, as did political confrontations over busing and integration in L.A. Burke opposed George "Duke" Deukmejian in the 1978 attorney general's race and lost in a campaign her supporters charged had been dominated by the issue of Burke's being Black, Gov. Jerry Brown a year later appointed Burke to fill a vacancy on the Los Angeles County board of supervisors, but when she ran for re-election to that post, she was defeated by a previously unknown telephone company executive named Dean Dana and his effective leafletting drive.

Burke herself says that being a Black woman has been both the greatest asset and most important hindrance of her political career. "I'm not so sure being a woman has been a deficit, because I've had tremendous support from women," she explains. On being a minority in California politics, she adds. "It's difficult to get elected in the first place, but once they are elected, people will accept minorities--once they know the person's not threatening."

Several times during her career, Burke has represented heavily white districts. However, she says she has not found this difficult because she "was willing to put in the time to get to know the people." At least in some areas, Burke was widely praised among her constituents for frequent appearances and attentive questioning at local meetings.

Burke's personal political philosophy has also helped her win support in conservative white areas where such backing would seem unlikely: "My feeling about representation is that a person should represent the people who elected him, unless there is an overwhelming philosophical difference on an issue," she says. For this reason, Burke explains, she steadfastly opposed state lotteries, although they were widely favored by many of her constituents. In addition, she adds that although she is "fairly sure" that most of the people she represented shared her views on minorities and women. "There was never any question in my mind...[that] I would never let anything, even my constituents, impair my feelings on those very basic issues of equality."

And it is in those areas that Burke has made her most significant contributions. Although the former congresswoman prizes her work in urban affairs, human rights and international relations, the bill that provoked the most national interest in her career was the Equal Opportunity for the Displaced Homemakers Act. Later part of a 1978 package of amendments to the Comprehensive Employment and Training Act, the homemakers measure provided federally subsidized employment and training for divorced and widowed women. Recalling that the idea was fairly radical when she introduced it, Burke adds with satisfaction. "That has now been accepted as a concept. It's very popular; there are now many programs for displaced homemakers across the country."

A second bill which Burke introduced ensured equal employment opportunity on the Alaskan pipeline by binding federal pipeline funds to the enactment of an affirmative action program. The "Burke Amendment" eventually resulted in the awarding of $312 million in contracts to women and minorities and, as Burke notes, "established a precedent for a different approach to affirmative action in contracts."

Although legislation such a this had an important impact on national policy, many of Burke's liberal stands came back to haunt her when she returned to California politics in 1978. And in more than one instance, her politics were linked to her race.

In the 1978 attorney general's race. Burke's opponent Deukmejian, made frequent reference to her stand on the deat penalty. Although she had never taken an active stance on the issue. Burke explains, "I had voted to substitute life imprisonment without possibility of parole for the death penalty, and I certainly had made statements that the death penalty as it was applied was not applied consistently." Burke charges that her opponent seized on the latter point in a way that had that certain kind of [racial] implication.

The most flagrant use of this tactic, however, same in the 1980 Board of Supervisors race against Dana, a Pacific Telephone executive Dana also campaigned on Burke's death penalty stance and threw in the busing issue as well. It was aclever tactic, but Burke had never been involved with the busing debate, and the Board of Supervisors had never had any jurisdiction over either issue. When Dana played his trump card on the last weekend of the campaign and defeated Burke, she decided to bow out of elective politics for good.

Burke contends that the time required to serve a constituency properly as well as the frustration over the legislative process in general would eventually have led her to return to private life. However, the effect of her last two campaigns was to "remove any nagging doubts I had about changing my goals and priorities." Pausing, she adds, "At this point obviously people are very susceptible to those tactics so that I'm sure if I ran again I would be subject to the same kind of situation."

But if Burke has decided to avoid the campaign trail in the future, she has not withdrawn from politics entirely. She predicts that Democrats and liberals in general will counter the conservative change that swept Ronald Reagan into office in 1980, and intends to help in the reconstruction effort she believes will follow. "Usually after something like this the same kind of sweep comes in again; it won't take a long time, but it'll be expensive, she says. Noting that the Right's recent success will probably result in some long term damage to several programs and regulatory agencies, she adds. "What you're really doing is going back and restructuring all of those things again. Maybe that's what has to happen, because sometimes people have real questions about the validity of some of those. Maybe it will show that they're not necessary or necessary in a very different way."

To meet this challenge, Burke believes the Democratic Party must rethink its goals and strategies. As the head of an "accountability" platform committee of the National Democratic Party, she and other party officials are developing a Democratic program and means to force their presidential candidate to adhere to it.

Burke may be working behind the scenes for the moment, but it seems certain that she will not abandon politics entirely. "Every one of us has a responsibility to try to make a dynamic change in a way that we can," she says. "Every person does it in a different way. I think even the same person sometimes does it in different ways at different times.... I do feel that I have a responsibility."

This article is based on an interview conducted last September.