DALLAS (AP) — For two decades, Rep. Eddie Bernice Johnson has been an outspoken voice for Democrats in her signature bright blazer and multicolored scarf.
Now the first black woman to represent North Texas in Congress faces serious opposition in the May 29 primary election, and the effort to unseat her is just one of several challenges against some of the longest-serving black members of Congress.
“I will always be ever more grateful for the trails that she has blazed,” said Eva Jones, owner of a barbeque restaurant who was chairwoman of Johnson’s first House campaign in 1992. But “there has come a time where we need new leadership, like in any business, like with anything.”
Longtime black incumbents in Dallas, Detroit and New York City are being challenged by a younger generation of black office-seekers who aren’t waiting for retirements by the old guard, including nationally known figures whose activism dates to the civil rights movement.
In Michigan, several people are challenging 82-year-old Rep. John Conyers, the oldest black member of the House.
One of his rivals, Michigan state Sen. Bert Johnson, said people who have voted for the congressman for decades in his Detroit district recognize that “perhaps we’re not trying to integrate lunch counters so much” as work to prevent foreclosures in struggling neighborhoods.”
“Those people know that there is a nexus between their experience and the youthful vigor and zeal that I bring to the table,” said Johnson, who at 38 was born eight years after Conyers took office in 1965 following his work with civil rights leaders Martin Luther King Jr. and Rosa Parks.
Eddie Bernice Johnson’s two challengers are careful not to criticize her directly, but say they hear increasing doubts from voters in south Dallas, where neighborhoods have struggled long before the recession.
“North Texas has seen a lot of economic growth. Unfortunately, this district and our community hasn’t really shared in that economic development,” said Taj Clayton, one of the congresswoman’s opponents.
Johnson, 76, grew up in Waco and moved to Dallas after college and took a job as a VA nurse. She decided to get into politics after a trip to buy a new hat at a shopping mall.
“I learned in just a very stark shock that I could not try the hat on,” she told the Dallas Morning News in 1987. “I never experienced that in Waco. We could try on clothes. I found that black women (in Dallas) could not try on shoes. People tried them on for you, or they would measure your foot and guess your size.”
She didn’t buy the hat. Instead, she organized a boycott and took her first step into politics. More than a decade later, local leaders encouraged her to run for Texas state representative, and she won.
In 1986, she was elected to the state Senate. Six years later, she ran for the U.S. House from a district she helped draw as a state senator.
She’s won 100 percent of the vote in every primary since. Johnson, who declined to be interviewed for this report, has won federal funding for new mass transit and other local projects. She’s also fought against a Republican-backed voter ID law that she says would disenfranchise minority voters.
Supporters said the congresswoman’s experience is needed in her district.
“This election is too important … to hand everything to a novice that’s going to help shape the policies for (President Barack Obama’s) second term,” said David Henderson Jr., a pastor and president of the Baptist Ministers Conference of Dallas. “We need someone with her stature, with her status.”
Read more at Black America Web
