On Election Day, Representative Barbara Lee, a California Democrat, joined some two dozen Black women outside a polling place in Prince George’s County, Md., to celebrate the rise of Vice President Kamala Harris.
The ebullient group included Angela Alsobrooks, who later that day became one of two African American women elected to the U.S. Senate, which has never had more than one Black woman serving at a time. Dawn Moore, the first lady of Maryland, was there too, as was the mayor of Bladensburg, Takisha James, and members of the Town Council, all of whom are Black women.
As the group gathered for a photo, an onlooker called out, “Black girl magic, right there!”
The enchantment evaporated that evening, as Ms. Lee, still wearing a T-shirt with Ms. Harris’s image and the slogan “It’s Time,” stood in a thinning crowd at the vice president’s victory party at Howard University. She had brought her grandson to witness history. Instead they left with “tears in our eyes,” she said.
The loss was deeply personal for Ms. Lee, 78, a liberal icon and the highest-ranking Black woman in the House leadership, whose first political job was working on Shirley Chisholm’s pathbreaking presidential campaign in 1972. Elected to Congress in 1998 from the same Oakland district where Ms. Harris grew up, Ms. Lee suffered a dismal primary loss in the race this year to fill the Senate seat vacated by the death of Senator Dianne Feinstein.
Ms. Lee passed the baton to Representative-elect Lateefah Simon at an event in Oakland last week.Credit…Christie Hemm Klok for The New York Times
The victor was Representative Adam Schiff, the California Democrat and favorite of Nancy Pelosi and the party’s establishment. Men now occupy both Senate seats in California (the other is Senator Alex Padilla), which for three decades had been America’s only state two continuously serving female senators. Campaigning across the country for Ms. Harris, Ms. Lee had hoped to work in her administration.
