Yvonne Brathwaite Burke was a rising star in California
and national politics years before she won a seat in the U.S.
House. In 1966 she became the first African-American
woman elected to the California assembly. At the 1972
Democratic National Convention she served as vice chair
of the platform committee, gaining national television
exposure. That same year she became the first African-American woman elected to Congress from California;
Burke and Barbara Jordan of Texas joined Shirley Chisholm
of New York as the only Black women to that point ever
elected to Congress. Burke’s meteoric career continued with
a prime appointment to the Appropriations Committee and
her election as the first woman chair of the Congressional
Black Caucus (CBC). Perhaps her most notable distinction
in the eyes of much of the public occurred in 1973, when
she became the first Congresswoman to give birth and be
granted maternity leave while serving in Congress.
Perle Yvonne Watson was born on October 5, 1932, in
Los Angeles, California, the only child of James Watson,
a custodian at the MGM film studios, and Lola (Moore)
Watson, a real estate agent in East Los Angeles. Yvonne (she
rejected the name Perle) grew up in modest circumstances
and at first was enrolled in a public school.1 At age four she
was transferred to a model school for exceptional children.
Watson became the vice president of her class at Manual
Arts High School in Los Angeles. She enrolled at the
University of California at Berkeley in 1949 but transferred
to the University of California at Los Angeles, where she
earned a BA in political science in 1953. She was among
the first Black women to be admitted to the University of
Southern California School of Law, Los Angeles, earning her
JD and passing the California bar in 1956. After graduating,
she found that no law firms would hire an African-American
woman and, consequently, entered into her own private
practice, specializing in civil, probate, and real estate law.
In addition to her private practice, she served as the state’s
deputy corporation commissioner and as a hearing officer
for the Los Angeles police commission. In 1957 Yvonne
Watson wed mathematician Louis Brathwaite. The marriage
ended in divorce in 1964. Yvonne Brathwaite organized a
legal defense team for Watts rioters in 1965 and was named
by Governor Edmund Brown to the McCone Commission,
which investigated the conditions that led to the unrest.
A year later she won election to the California assembly.
She eventually chaired the assembly’s committee on urban
development and won re-election in 1968 and 1970.2
Brathwaite ultimately grew impatient with the slow
pace of social legislation in the California assembly and,
when court-mandated reapportionment created a new
congressional district, decided to enter the race for the seat.
The district encompassed much of southwest Los Angeles,
was nearly 75 percent registered Democrats, and had a large
African-American constituency. In the Democratic primary,
Brathwaite faced Billy Mills, a popular African-American Los
Angeles city councilman. She amassed 54 percent of the vote
to defeat Mills and three other challengers. Just days after
the primary, on June 14, 1972, Yvonne Brathwaite married
businessman William Burke, who had been an aide to Mills.
Less than a month later, Yvonne Brathwaite Burke garnered
national media attention as the vice chair of the Democratic
National Convention in Miami Beach that nominated
Senator George Stanley McGovern of South Dakota. She
spent much of the convention controlling the gavel during
the long and sometimes-raucous platform deliberations,
eventually helping to pass revised rules that gave minorities
and young voters a greater voice in shaping party policy.3
The convention exposure only added to Burke’s luster,
though it was hardly a factor in the general election that
November in the heavily Democratic district. Burke faced
31-year-old Gregg Tria, a recent law school graduate, who
ran on an anti-busing and anti-abortion platform. Burke
defeated Tria easily, winning 73 percent of the vote. In
Burke’s subsequent re-election bids in 1974 and 1976, she
won 80 percent of the vote against Republicans Tom Neddy
and Edward Skinner, respectively.4
In Burke’s first term during the 93rd Congress (1973–
1975), she received assignments on two committees: Public
Works; and Interior and Insular Affairs. She gave up both
of those panels in December 1974 to accept a seat on the
powerful Appropriations Committee, where she served
for the duration of her House career. Burke’s appointment
to the panel occurred at a time when African Americans
began to serve simultaneously on the most influential
House committees: Appropriations (Burke and Louis
Stokes of Ohio), Ways and Means (Charles B. Rangel of
New York and Harold Eugene Ford of Tennessee), and
Rules (Andrew Jackson Young Jr. of Georgia).5 In the 94th
Congress (1975–1977), Burke was appointed chair of the
Select Committee on the House Beauty Shop, an honorific
position that rotated among the women Members.
Burke made national headlines again as a freshman
Member when she revealed in the spring of 1973 that she
was expecting a child. In Congress, she said, “at that time
and you were a woman, everything about you was always
open to the press. Your life was an open book.”6 When
Autumn Roxanne Burke was born on November 23, 1973,
Yvonne Burke became the first Member to give birth while
serving in Congress.7 The House subsequently granted
Burke maternity leave, another first in congressional
history.8 The Burkes also had a daughter, Christine, from
William Burke’s previous marriage.
Representative Burke recognized that the civil rights
struggle had shifted to a phase in which less overt
discrimination must be confronted. “The kinds of things
we faced in my generation were easy to understand,”
she explained. “Your parents said, ‘They don’t let you sit
down here, they don’t let you go to that place.’ Everybody
knew. But now it is so complex, so frustrating to young
people when they are led to believe that everything is fine,
yet at the same time it is not fine.”9 Minority interests
were always at the forefront of Burke’s legislative agenda.
During her first term in office she fought the Richard M.
Nixon administration’s efforts to unravel some of the
programs established under former President Lyndon B.
Johnson’s Great Society, particularly the Office of Economic
Opportunity (OEO), which Nixon had stripped of many
of its powers. One of Burke’s earliest House Floor speeches
defended the OEO.10
Burke also fought for equal opportunities for minority-owned
businesses in the construction of the Trans-Alaskan
Pipeline by adding two amendments to the bill that
provided the framework for the nearly 800-mile-long
project. One amendment required that affirmative action
programs be created to award some pipeline contracts to
minority businesses. A later version of that amendment
would require that any project funded with federal dollars
must provide affirmative action incentives, reminiscent
of the legislative technique used by Adam Clayton Powell
Jr., of New York, which involved the attachment of
antidiscrimination riders to legislation involving federal
funding. “The construction of the Alaskan Pipeline
will create substantial employment opportunities, and
it therefore seems desirable and appropriate to extend
the existing programs for non-discrimination and equal
employment opportunity” to that project, Burke told
colleagues on the House Floor.11 Burke’s second amendment
to the bill, the Buy America Act, required that the materials
to construct the pipeline be manufactured in the United
States “to the maximum extent feasible.”12 Despite voicing
strong concerns about potential environmental problems,
Burke continued to back the Alaska pipeline project,
believing it would help the impending energy crisis in the
United States.13
Early in her House career, Burke seemed to take to
heart the advice of former President Johnson, who had
counseled her as a freshman Member, “Don’t talk so much
on the House Floor.”14 Over time, however, she earned a
reputation as a legislator who avoided confrontation and
controversy yet worked determinedly behind the scenes
to effect changes she believed were important. “I don’t
believe in grand-standing but in the poverty areas, if there
is something we need, then I’ll go after it,” she explained.15
Using her experience as a former state legislator in the
California assembly, Burke chose her positions carefully and
usually refrained from partisan rhetoric in debates. “I took
always a lot of pride in my ability to bring people together,
to compromise issues, to negotiate issues,” she said. “I was
always direct. I was me.”16
With quiet determination, Representative Burke
supported most major feminist issues and joined the
Congressional Women’s Caucus when it was founded in
1977, serving as the group’s first treasurer.17 She was part of
a successful effort to extend the time limit for ratification
of the Equal Rights Amendment by an additional three
years.18 That same year, the California Representative
introduced the Displaced Homemakers Act, which
authorized the creation of job training centers for women
entering the labor market, particularly middle-aged, self-supporting
women who were re-entering the job market
after an absence of many years. The purpose of the bill,
which also provided health and financial counseling,
was “to help displaced homemakers make it through a
readjustment period so that they may have the opportunity
to become productive, self-sufficient members of society,”
Burke explained.19 In 1977 she vigorously criticized the
Hyde Amendment, which prohibited the use of federal
Medicaid funds for abortions. “The basic premise which
we cannot overlook is that if the Government will not pay
for an indigent woman’s abortion, she cannot afford to go
elsewhere,” Burke wrote in a New York Times op-ed piece.20
In 1978 Burke introduced a bill to prohibit pregnancy-related
discrimination in the workplace, particularly
employer policies that kept women out of their jobs for
long periods before and after childbirth.21
These efforts in support of women’s rights, along with
her prominent committee assignments and her role as chair
of the CBC from 1976 to 1977, positioned Representative
Burke to meet the needs of what she called her “three
constituencies. I had a constituency of African Americans,
a constituency of women, and a constituency that elected
me.” She was part of a group of Members who were asked
to appear at events across the nation in the 1970s. In states
“that did not have women-elected Members and who
did not have African-American-elected Members—they
expected us to go,” she recalled.22
Burke never seemed completely at home on Capitol Hill,
however. Publicly, she expressed her desire to have a more
direct and administrative effect on policy than the demands
of her job allowed her. However, associates believed that
by 1977 the distance from her husband and her 4-year-old
daughter in Los Angeles and the 3,000-mile biweekly
commute had left her exhausted and unhappy.23
In 1978 Burke declined to run for re-election to the
96th Congress (1979–1981), in order to campaign for
the office of California attorney general, the chief law
enforcement position for the state (and a position no
woman had ever held in any state government). She won
the Democratic nomination but lost to Republican state
senator George Deukmejian in the general election. In June
1979, California Governor Jerry Brown appointed Burke
to the Los Angeles County board of supervisors, making
her the first Black person ever to sit on the panel. In 1980
she lost her bid to a new four-year term and returned to
private law practice. In 1984 Burke was the vice chair of
the Los Angeles Olympics Organizing Committee. Burke
became the first African American to win outright election
as an L.A. County supervisor in 1992, defeating future
Representative Diane Watson by a narrow margin.24 A
year later, she became the first woman and the first person
of color to chair the board. Burke served 16 years on the
board of supervisors until her retirement in 2008. In 2012
she was appointed to the Amtrak board of directors by
President Barack Obama. She also serves on the California
transportation commission.25
View Record in the Biographical Directory of the U.S. Congress
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