In 1972, Yvonne Brathwaite Burke made history as the
first African-American woman elected to Congress from
California and only the third Black woman to serve on
Capitol Hill. Six years earlier, she had become the first
African-American woman elected to the California state
assembly, beginning a meteoric and ground-breaking rise to
the highest echelons of political power. In the U.S. House of
Representatives, Burke’s assignment to the Appropriations
Committee enabled her to influence federal spending, and
her election as the first woman chair of the Congressional
Black Caucus (CBC) provided a platform to influence
policy across the government. In 1973, Burke became the
first woman in Congress to both give birth and be granted
maternity leave while serving.
Yvonne Brathwaite Burke was born Perle Yvonne Watson
on October 5, 1932, in Los Angeles, California, the only
child of James Watson, a custodian at the MGM film
studios, and Lola Watson, a real estate agent in East Los
Angeles. Burke, who rejected the name Perle and went by
Yvonne, grew up in modest circumstances. At age four, she
transferred from the public school to a model school for
exceptional children and later 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
before transferring to the University of California at Los
Angeles, where she earned a bachelor’s degree in political
science in 1953. She was among the first Black women
admitted to the University of Southern California School of
Law. She earned her law degree and passed the California bar
in 1956. In 1957, she wed mathematician Louis Brathwaite;
they divorced in 1964. In 1972, she married William Burke.
They raised two children: Christine, who was William Burke’s
child from a previous marriage, and Autumn.
Even though she held a prestigious law degree, legal
firms in the city discriminated against her and refused to
hire Burke because she was a Black woman. Consequently,
Burke opened her own private practice, specializing in civil,
probate, and real estate law. She also served as the state’s
deputy corporation commissioner and as a hearing officer
for the Los Angeles police commission. Burke organized a
legal defense fund for people arrested during the wave of
civil unrest, arson, and property destruction that occurred in
Watts, a Los Angeles neighborhood, in 1965. She was also
named by Governor Edmund G. Brown Jr. to the McCone
Commission, which investigated the conditions that led to
the unrest. A year later, in 1966, 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. Among her assembly bills were measures to
reinstate retirement benefits for any Japanese Americans that
lost their qualifications after being interned during World
War II, to create a Black studies program in state schools,
and to instruct the attorney general to perform a study on
police and community interactions.1
Burke ultimately grew impatient with the slow pace of
legislation in the California assembly and, when court-mandated
reapportionment created a new congressional
district, she decided to enter the race for the U.S. House
seat. The new district encompassed much of southwest Los
Angeles and had a large African-American constituency.
Democrats made up nearly 75 percent of registered voters.
In the Democratic primary, Burke defeated Billy Mills, a
popular Black Los Angeles city councilman, as well as three
other challengers, with 54 percent of the vote. Less than a
month later, she 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. Burke 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.2
Back home in Los Angeles that fall, Burke faced 31-yearold
Gregg Tria, a recent law school graduate who ran on
an antibusing and anti-abortion platform, in the general
election. Burke defeated Tria easily, winning 73 percent of
the vote. Burke won re-election with 80 percent of the vote
in both 1974 and 1976, against Republicans Tom Neddy
and Edward Skinner, respectively.3
In Burke’s first term during the 93rd Congress (1973–1975), she received assignments on two committees: Public
Works; and Interior and Insular Affairs. When a spot on the
powerful Appropriations Committee opened in late 1974,
the Democratic Caucus wanted a Member from California
to fill it. Encouraged by Representative Phillip Burton of
California, Burke campaigned for the committee vacancy
and won, giving up her other two committee assignments
to join the panel. She served on Appropriations for the
duration of her House career. Burke’s appointment to the
panel occurred at a time when African-American lawmakers
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 E. Ford of Tennessee), and Rules (Andrew
Young of Georgia).4
In the 94th Congress (1975–1977), Burke was appointed
chair of the Select Committee on the House Beauty Shop,
a position that rotated among the women Members and
oversaw the facility used by women lawmakers and House
staff. Burke set out to address workplace inequalities at
the beauty shop, improving salaries as well as the facility’s
physical condition. “The women at the beauty shop were
not treated very well,” Burke remembered years later. “I
just became very concerned about them. And they said,
‘We need someone who is willing to carry our water, to
really kind of take up for us.’” When her staff questioned
the decision to chair the committee, Burke brushed aside
their concerns. “‘Someone has to stand up for women, and
someone has to stand up for women who are working over
there in the beauty shop,’” she replied.5
Burke made national headlines in her first term 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.” When Autumn Roxanne
Burke was born on November 23, 1973, Burke became the
first Member to give birth while serving in Congress. The
House subsequently granted Burke maternity leave, another
first in congressional history.6
The interests of low-income and minority communities
were at the forefront of Burke’s legislative agenda. During
her first term in office, she fought efforts by the Richard M.
Nixon administration to dismantle certain programs
established as part of President Lyndon B. Johnson’s
Great Society agenda, particularly the Office of Economic
Opportunity (OEO), which oversaw federal efforts to end
poverty. In testimony before the Education and Labor
Committee’s Subcommittee on Equal Opportunities,
Burke argued that any effort to defund or relocate
responsibilities of the OEO would be a detriment to low-income
Americans. She pointed to the agency’s community
development, health care, and law services as successes
of the program. “With the dismantling of OEO, not
only the symbol of concern, but the actual involvement
and commitment of the government will be suspended,”
she said. “Who will lobby for the poor in communities
where the poor have no effective voice in the decisions
of governments?”7
Representative Burke recognized that the civil rights
struggle had shifted to a phase in which less overt
discrimination still plagued the country and needed to be
addressed by Congress. In an article for Ebony, she wrote,
“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.”8
Burke also fought for equal opportunities for minority-owned
businesses in the construction of the Trans-Alaska
Pipeline by adding two amendments to the bill that
provided the framework for the nearly 800-mile-long
project. Encouraged by a letter from a worker in Seattle,
Washington, about the participation of minority businesses
in the project, one of Burke’s amendments required the
Secretary of the Interior to enforce a rule outlawing
discrimination against people or businesses from the hiring,
supply, and contracting processes based on their “race, creed,
color, national origin, or sex.” Speaking on the House Floor,
Burke emphasized that “the construction of the Alaskan
Pipeline will create substantial employment opportunities,
and it therefore seems desirable and appropriate to extend
the existing programs for nondiscrimination and equal
employment opportunity” to the project. Burke’s second
amendment to the bill, the Buy America Act, required
builders to use domestic manufacturing products “to the
maximum extent feasible” on the pipeline. Despite voicing
strong concerns about the pipeline’s potential environmental
problems, Burke continued to back the project with the
belief that it would support the United States’ energy sector.9
In 1975, Burke commented on her position on
Appropriations: “My general philosophy as a committee
member will be to reorder spending priorities toward
domestic, people-oriented programs and cut back on
nonessential defense spending.” As a committee member,
she objected to raising bus fares in Washington, DC,
sought funding for an American Indian hospital in Los
Angeles, and pushed for more diversity in the Federal
Bureau of Investigation.10
Burke seemed to take to heart the advice former
President Johnson gave her before she started her
congressional career: “Don’t talk so much on the House
Floor,” he told her. Over time, 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. 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.”11
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. She was part of
the effort that extended the time limit for ratification of the
Equal Rights Amendment by an additional three years. In
the 94th Congress, the California Representative introduced
the Displaced Homemakers Act, which authorized the
creation of job training centers for women—particularly
middle-aged, self-supporting women—who were entering
or re-entering the labor market after 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. 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. 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.12
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.13
After three terms in the House, the demands of traveling
to and from California with her young family convinced Burke to seek out new opportunities back home on the West
Coast. Hoping to have a more direct and administrative
effect on policy than the demands of her job in the House
allowed, Burke declined to run for re-election to the
96th Congress (1979–1981) to campaign for the office
of California attorney general, the chief law enforcement
position for the state (and a position no woman had
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 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 a
Los Angeles County supervisor in 1992, defeating future
Representative Diane E. Watson by a narrow margin. 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 2010,
Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger appointed Burke to the
California transportation commission. In 2012, she was
appointed to the Amtrak board of directors by President
Barack Obama.14
View Record in the Biographical Directory of the U.S. Congress
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