In 2008, Donna F. Edwards won a special election to
become the first African-American woman elected to
Congress from Maryland. In her nine years in the U.S.
House of Representatives, Edwards earned a reputation as
a leading progressive who worked to raise the minimum
wage, invest in scientific research, and protect women
from domestic violence. “People do want change,” she said
during her primary campaign in 2008. “And the question is
whether they have enough confidence and courage. Change
is liberating, but it’s hard.”1
Donna Edwards was born in Yanceyville, North
Carolina, on June 28, 1958, the second of six children.
Her father, John Edwards, served in the United States Air
Force, and her mother, Mary, was a homemaker. The family
moved frequently with each new duty assignment. After
attending high school in New Mexico, Edwards graduated
from Thomas Stone High School in Waldorf, Maryland,
and completed a bachelor’s degree in English from North
Carolina’s Wake Forest University in 1980. After college,
Edwards worked as an assistant director for the United
Nations Development Program before moving into the
private sector. She later worked as a project engineer for
an aerospace company at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight
Center, in Greenbelt, Maryland. In 1989, she earned a law
degree from Franklin Pierce Law Center in Concord, New
Hampshire. Edwards married and had one son, Jared, before
she divorced her husband. During the separation, Edwards
and her son briefly experienced homelessness, relying on a
food pantry for meals, before moving in with her mother.2
After law school, Edwards worked for a handful of
nonprofit advocacy groups in the Washington, DC, area.
“I have a passion for working in the nonprofit sector,” she
recalled. In 1992, she joined Public Citizen and Congress
Watch to advocate on consumer issues. Two years later,
she moved to the Center for a New Democracy, where
she worked on campaign finance reform and rose to
the position of executive director. In 1996, she helped
found and led the National Network to End Domestic
Violence—an issue she confronted in her own marriage.
In 2000, Edwards became the executive director of the Arca
Foundation, a social equity and justice advocacy group.3
In 2006, Edwards challenged seven-term incumbent
Representative Albert Russell Wynn in the Democratic
primary for a seat in the U.S. House of Representatives
from Maryland’s Fourth Congressional District. The
district, which was 57 percent Black and had a large population of federal workers, straddled Prince George’s
and Montgomery Counties and bordered Washington,
DC. With her well-funded campaign, Edwards challenged
Wynn’s support for the Iraq War and the George W. Bush
administration’s energy policy as well as his ties with the
business community. Her campaign gained momentum
when bloggers online publicized her candidacy, drawing
funds and celebrity endorsements from Barbra Streisand,
Danny Glover, and Gloria Steinem. But Wynn narrowly
staved off Edwards’s challenge that year, winning with 50
percent to her 46 percent.4
Edwards filed her candidacy for a rematch against Wynn
in May 2007. By the 2008 Democratic primary, Edwards
had won the endorsement of MoveOn.org, the National
Organization for Women, and EMILY’s List. Edwards
refused to accept contributions from political action
committees and criticized Wynn for accepting campaign
donations from special interests. Edwards won the 2008
primary, taking 59 percent of the vote to Wynn’s 37
percent. When Wynn resigned at the end of May, Maryland
officials set a special election for June 17. Edwards won the
special election over Republican challenger Peter James, a
technology developer, 81 percent to 18 percent. She went
on to win the full term later that fall and easily won reelection
in all her subsequent races, even after redistricting
in 2012 cut out the Montgomery County portions of her
district and expanded its boundaries eastward to include
Republican areas in Anne Arundel County.5
Edwards’s House committee assignments reflected her
constituents’ interests and concerns. Not only was she
a former NASA employee, but her district sat adjacent
to world-renowned Goddard Space Flight Center. Her
district was also home to thousands of federal workers who
commuted daily to the nation’s capital, often through heavy
traffic. With those considerations in mind, Edwards was
appointed to the Science and Technology Committee (which
was renamed Science, Space, and Technology in 2011) and to
the Transportation and Infrastructure. She also served on the
Ethics Committee during the 112th Congress (2011–2013).6
Edwards used her seat on the Science, Space, and
Technology Committee to support NASA funding and
boost measures encouraging minority education in science
and mathematics. On Transportation and Infrastructure,
Edwards took an interest in mass transit legislation,
specifically rail projects in the Washington metropolitan
area. She used her seat on the committee to question
federal agencies about the lack of funding for projects in
her district and Prince George’s County, “making them
answer questions about why there was this kind of disparity
and pushing them to open up the doors of opportunity for
this majority African-American county,” she later said. She
promoted the addition of rail service to connect the two
northern ends of the Washington Metropolitan Area
Transit Authority system (commonly called Metro) with
a new purple line and called on officials to investigate the
possibility of rail service on the Woodrow Wilson Bridge
connecting Maryland to Virginia south of the District.7
On national issues, Edwards supported a resolution
to withdraw U.S. forces from Afghanistan and remained
critical of the pace of the troop withdrawal from Iraq. In
2008, she only voted for the financial-services bailout after
a direct appeal by Democratic presidential nominee Barack
Obama. Edwards was a strong advocate for universal health
care, having gone for nearly two years without health
insurance before she started her nonprofit career. An illness
during that period left her with medical debt. “It contributed
greatly to the way I think about the health care system,”
she said of her experience. “If I had been able to [get help]
early on and get $20 worth of antibiotics, it would have
saved me thousands of dollars, and it would have saved the
system thousands of dollars.” She cosponsored several bills to
provide Medicare for all Americans and authored a provision
in the Affordable Care Act that empowers state insurance
commissioners to review health insurance rate increases to
prevent unjustified price hikes. Two of her recurring pieces
of legislation included the WAGES Act—introduced in
2009, 2011, and 2013—which sought to raise the national
minimum wage for tipped employees, and her 21st Century
Investment Act—introduced in the 111th through the 114th
Congress (2009–2017)—which would have improved the
tax incentives for conducting research and development in
the United States.8
Edwards assisted in candidate recruitment for the
Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC)
in 2012 before being tapped by Democratic Leader Nancy
Pelosi of California to lead the effort in 2014. Edwards
later said she enjoyed “talking to prospective candidates
to recruit them, but also identifying candidates that hadn’t
come through the traditional sources by calling my friends
in organized labor and my friends in the nonprofit sector
across the country saying, ‘Who do you know?’” Alongside
her campaign work, Edwards served as co-chair of the Democratic Steering and Policy Committee, which determined
committee assignments and helped drive the party’s agenda
in the House. “She’s already achieved a status in the caucus,
title or not, as a go-to person, a leader,” Pelosi said of Edwards
in 2014. Although she made significant inroads in her
party’s caucus, she failed to develop a similar rapport within
the Congressional Black Caucus (CBC). “I defeated their
guy,” she reflected, referring to her predecessor Albert Wynn.
“I think some people never really got over that.”9
When Barbara Ann Mikulski announced her retirement
from the U.S. Senate, Edwards declared her candidacy
for the open seat in March 2015, pledging to champion
“the middle-class American dream.” She quickly won
the endorsement of EMILY’s List and other progressive
groups, but the CBC refused to endorse either her or her
Democratic challenger, fellow Maryland Representative
Christopher Van Hollen. Edwards ended up losing to Van
Hollen in the primary, 53 to 39 percent. In her concession
speech, Edwards voiced a number of concerns about the
future of her party, including issues she had faced in the
House. “What I want to know from my Democratic Party
is, when will the voices of people of color, when will the
voices of women, when will the voices of labor, when will
the voices of black women, when will our voices be effective,
legitimate equal leaders in a big-tent party?”10
After finishing her term in the 114th Congress
(2015–2017), Edwards got behind the wheel of an RV she
christened “Lucille” and drove around the country, visiting
national parks and spending time at historic sites, including
the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama. She used the
trip to connect to people and places “who are not centered
around Washington,” she said in an interview midway
through her travels. Improving access and opportunities for
underrepresented communities remained forefront during
her cross-country trip. “There are 104 women who serve
in the United States Congress, a very small percentage
of them are Black and Brown women,” she said in 2017.
“We need many more women in every step of our elected
office.” Edwards also worked as a political commentator
and newspaper columnist.11
View Record in the Biographical Directory of the U.S. Congress
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