Mr. Speaker, I was a work in progress sometimes. Barbara would look at me and get that look on her face. I just don't get it sometimes. Barbara, as a neighbor, colleague, and friend, I just wanted to come down and thank you and talk about…
Mr. Speaker, I was a work in progress sometimes. Barbara would look at me and get that look on her face.
I just don't get it sometimes.
Barbara, as a neighbor, colleague, and friend, I just wanted to come down and thank you and talk about two specific instances where you made me a better person and, as an example of how you have illuminated this country, that if you can't talk about trouble, then you can't talk about love and you can't talk about making people better.
We were down here in the well when I first got here after Ferguson. Elijah Cummings and John Lewis were sitting right there. I can't remember which one of us started this, but the conversation was: If we can't talk about race in the bay area, and gosh knows we have enough trouble there, where the heck in the country can we?
So, we started that. You taught me so much. John Powell from the Haas Institute for diversity is just a wonderful man. All his staff would come to these townhalls. I don't know how many we had, but Judy Chu, Karen Bass, and Ted Lieu came to a very diverse area in our two districts. It was wonderful, and I learned so much about myself and my own biases and prejudices. It was illuminating, too, because I had liberal White Democrats come up to me, I told you this, and say: Why are you doing this?
You had one of those moments where: Why are you surprised?
Then, we brought John back here to the Democratic Caucus, and I am told that, at the time, it was the largest turnout the Caucus ever had because Professor Powell talked about his experience at Ohio State and Cal, his studies on diversity, and why confronting bias and racism was so important for the health of this country. That was wonderful and continues to be, and we are going to continue to do it.
Then, for people who don't know about the Port Chicago 50, it was the largest domestic loss of life in the United States during World War II, when the very segregated, racist Navy was having Black African-American sailors load ships at Port Chicago, which was in San Francisco Bay in my district, in our neighborhood.
These young men came from all over the country in the forties because they wanted to defend America in spite of all of our flaws, particularly from the South. They were told how to load munitions in such a way that was so dangerous and so different from the White Teamsters who did the same work. Because of this disregard, the White officers would actually bet on which group would load more, and they would just throw these weapons into these ships.
One morning, disaster struck. The ship exploded. You could hear the explosion 20, 50 miles away. It rattled windows in San Francisco 15 miles away. We lost over 300 African-American sailors that day.
They had to go down into that water the next day. The ship was gone, and the pier was gone. They went into the water under instruction from their White officers to get the bodies and the parts from their colleagues out of there.
Reading about that in the book and the history about it--anyway, for 80 years, this has gone on. Fifty of those young men who volunteered to serve this country in horrible conditions and who survived were taken to court-martial and got the worst possible sentence, 50 of them, for disobeying an order that they knew was dangerous. They didn't disobey it; they just said: We are brave men, but we don't want to go back to the same circumstances. So for that, they were court-martialed.
Thurgood Marshall helped defend them, and as part of what he said about similar cases: I come not just to defend these men, but I come to defend the sacred creed in our founding documents.
So for 40 years, my predecessor tried to get a change. With your help and for the 10 years I have been here, we have tried to get a change.
Toward the end, I was arguing with the Navy and with the White House. In the last conversation, I was emulating you. I was a little irritated.
I said: Goddamn it, can't we just do this for Barbara Lee before she retires?
The secret weapon in that was, a month later, the Secretary of the Navy called me and said: We are going to exonerate those sailors.
Those are just two specific examples of how you have raised people up and raised me up, and there is so much more that everyone else has talked about, about poverty and your dogged determination for justice. You have done it in a way that has gone to people who a lot of us wouldn't go to, but you have gone to everyone and went after, as Lincoln said, ``the better angels of our nature,'' and you were able to persuade them.
So, I am going to miss you so much.
I know. I know you are going to be coming and using that finger every once in a while saying: Come on, man.
In our districts, if you come to the bay area, you can still see bumper
stickers that say: ``Barbara Lee Speaks for Me.'' Indeed, Barbara, thank you for speaking for so many Americans.