“WE’RE NOT MEN”
We gave you life, we gave you birth . . .
We fem the future, don’t make it worse.
—Janelle Monáe, “Django Jane”
Maxine’s first order of business when she was elected to the California State Assembly was to correct her title: Assemblyman. Okaayyy. As a feminist, imagine how she squirmed when they kept referring to her as such. And gurl, on her day one in office, Auntie Maxine stepped in ready to put up a fight about it. The first bill she authored was to have the official address for members of the assembly changed from “Assemblyman” to “Assemblyperson” or “Assemblymember.”
“I didn’t know I was going to create such a stir,” she told Rye. “The men went crazy. They said I was trying to neuter them. They were really taken aback by this new member who was going to come and change the language . . . so they took me on.”
Fortunately, she had an influential friend named Willie Brown, who had served on the California State Assembly and would become Speaker, a post he held for fifteen years, and the first African American mayor of San Francisco. “I remember the first day I was in the assembly and I tried to take on the entire body, and not have them refer to us as assemblymen. I thought the women needed to be called assemblymember, and of course, all of those legislators took me on and they slashed into me, and Willie Brown came to my defense. He jumped up on the floor and said that he was my attorney representing me,” Waters shared, clearly tickled by that, in the 1993 Willie Brown documentary, “and he defended me at a time when I didn’t know what to do under attack. . . . He allowed me and many others an opportunity to realize our potential, by giving us assignments and letting us excel in ways that we wanted to. . . . I was proud that I helped to make Willie Brown Speaker.”
DURING HER FOURTEEN-YEAR tenure in California state politics, Waters gained national and international attention for her outspoken, no-holds-barred style but also for many of her legislative efforts. One of her proudest was, in 1984, when she joined a powerful coalition of Black political executives who founded the Free South Africa movement. Randall Robinson, a Harvard-trained lawyer, was the founder of TransAfrica (and brother to the first Black network news anchor on television, Max Robinson). Robinson brought with him the chair of the US Civil Rights Commission, Mary Frances Berry; US Delegate from Washington, DC, Walter Fauntroy; and Eleanor Holmes Norton, then a Yale-trained lawyer and professor at Georgetown University. All of these people were accomplished and admired in their time, and all of them had cut their teeth in some way in the struggles for equal justice in America. TransAfrica was headquartered in DC, and Waters joined the coalition determined to create a Los Angeles branch.
One of TransAfrica’s initiatives was to create American public awareness of the struggle in South Africa by engaging in civil disobedience. This would shift American foreign policy in South Africa to one of constructive engagement, which would incentivize South Africa to confront its systemic racial problems and have their activism influence other Western nations to follow suit. It would also put pressure on American interests to divest their support in South Africa and end the apartheid regime that had imprisoned Nelson Mandela and continuously terrorized his wife, Winnie Mandela, and their family. These ideas came directly out of the intellectual and philosophical arguments of the civil rights movement, which had asserted the need for Black unity across the peoples of the African diaspora. During this time, African Americans could be seen wearing traditional or stylized African garments made out of African prints and cloth as a display of African unity. More natural hairdos emerged, and bold patterns and flamboyant color took over the Black fashion scene.
The coalition planned and executed repeated sit-ins in front of the embassy of South Africa in Washington, DC, and regularly staged protests where marchers were arrested and taken to jail. While 4,500 protesters were arrested in one year, the Free South Africa Movement (FSAM) was also pushing universities and American businesses to divest their holdings in South Africa. Waters devised a goal to advocate that the state of California divest significant holdings in the South African diamond business and curtail its interaction with the South African government.
Then, in 1980, after serving on the Democratic National Committee, Waters began to lead sit-ins, marches, and rallies against corporations doing business with South Africa’s apartheid regime, and successfully authored legislation that constituted the largest divestment of state pension funds from businesses with dealings in South Africa. She also authored an assembly bill that called for the divestment of $12 million from the California state pension fund from corporations that were doing business in South Africa. She has led efforts and continues to facilitate congressional agendas to cancel the debts that impoverished countries in Africa and Latin America owe to wealthy institutions like the World Bank and to free poor countries from international debt.
Sis, she was also responsible for landmark affirmative-action legislation that opened state procurement and contracting opportunities to women- and minority-owned businesses.
Many people don’t know much about Auntie Maxine’s work, but she’s been around pulling back the curtain on injustice behind the scenes for a long time. She authored numerous pieces of legislation, including: a law requiring state agencies to award a percentage of public contracts to minorities and women, tenants’ rights laws, and a law restricting police officers in their use of strip searches. She created the first statewide child-abuse-prevention training program.
For her tireless efforts to serve and her significant, effective legislative achievements, Waters’s capability as a legislator was recognized when she was named chair of the Assembly Democratic Caucus. The chair leads all the Democratic members of the assembly, sets the Democratic agenda for each legislative session, is in charge of persuading members of the caucus to vote for the agenda, and works across the aisle to win votes from Republicans, especially when the Democrats are in the minority, to assure passage of the Democratic agenda, so that bills are signed into law.
By 1985, Waters was focused on establishing effective resources for the community. She created Project Build, a job-training program for unemployed people living in L.A.’s housing projects. At Nickerson Gardens, one of the housing projects where the program was launched, 1,500 out of 4,000 residents were unemployed at the time. Nickerson consists of 156 buildings with town house–style units joined to single-bedroom units. The community was almost 95 percent African American, and some call it the birthplace of the Bloods.
Thanks to Auntie Maxine’s advocacy, the state Employment Development Department provided $250,000 in funding for the program. Auntie Maxine and the job experts whom she enlisted from the area created the workshop’s content. The seminars instructed the residents on how to fill out a job application, how to interview, and how to find childcare. On the last day, major employers at the time like Unocal, Charles Drew Postgraduate Medical School, and Pacific Bell, where Waters herself had been employed, would come to interview the residents. If the residents attended all four classes, they would attend a graduation ceremony. The classes served up to one hundred participants. Auntie Maxine was so committed that she would conduct some of the four-day seminars herself. Many of the students were welfare recipients or students lacking a high school diploma who had given up on the job search. But they just needed a spark of encouragement, and that spark was Maxine Waters. Some of the graduates ended up getting jobs and others went on to get their high school diploma or professional training. And the program didn’t leave the others behind, either—there were always follow-up sessions with counselors if they weren’t able to find a job the first time.
The Maxine Waters Employment Preparation Center (MWEPC) was established in 1989, an official school within the Los Angeles Unified School District (LAUSD). It had formerly been the Watts Skills Center. The center offered vocational education in areas such as nursing, banking, and auto mechanics, and was named after the assemblywoman for the work she had blessed upon the community.
Read: Auntie Maxine is much, much more than a meme, baby. *snap, snap*