From Shirley Chisholm to City Hall: Barbara Lee and the Power of Mayors

Southern Black Organizers · Post-Election Series · The Sunbelt Spear, Part 4 of 4

In 1972 Barbara Lee was a single mother of two sons, on public assistance, studying psychology at Mills College in Oakland and serving as president of its Black Student Union. She was an organizer, but not a voter. Like many young activists around her, she distrusted the two-party system. Then Shirley Chisholm came to campus. Lee asked how she could help. Chisholm's answer was blunt: first, register to vote. "Then you have to get on the inside and help us."

Lee registered. Fifty-four years later, on Tuesday, Oakland voters gave her a full four-year term as mayor with just over 84 percent of the vote, while a measure giving the mayor stronger powers was leading. Her path runs from a college organizer's question through twenty-six years of courageous dissent in Congress and back to the city that made her.

The Organizer at Mills

Lee's fight with segregation began at birth. Born Barbara Jean Tutt in El Paso, Texas, on July 16, 1946, she arrived after a segregated hospital refused to admit her mother, who was left in a hallway through a complicated delivery that left her daughter with a scar above one eye. Her father was an Army officer who served in two wars. After the family moved to San Fernando, California, in 1960, she was barred from her high school's cheerleading squad because she was Black. She took the case to the local NAACP and integrated the squad, her first organized victory.

Lee's activism began in Oakland's streets before it reached any ballot. She volunteered in the Black Panther Party's community survival programs, which fed children breakfast and offered health screenings when the city would not, and later worked on Bobby Seale's 1973 campaign for mayor. At Mills she pushed for Black studies and for the needs of student mothers like herself.

When Chisholm launched the first major-party presidential campaign by a Black woman, Lee invited her to speak to the Mills student body. Chisholm talked about Vietnam, poverty, education, reproductive rights and coalition-building, the issues Lee already cared about. Her instruction to register turned Lee from a critic of the system into an organizer inside it. Lee ran Chisholm's Northern California campaign effort and went to the 1972 Democratic National Convention in Miami as a Chisholm delegate.

Chisholm's Student, Dellums's Apprentice

Chisholm stayed a mentor for the rest of her life, advising Lee through campaigns for the State Assembly, the State Senate and Congress. Lee's other teacher was Rep. Ron Dellums, the East Bay's antiwar congressman, whom she served for eleven years, rising to chief of staff. In her own words, recorded for the Explorations in Black Leadership oral-history project, Lee describes Dellums as her Oakland mentor. She worked for him, and he served as her political mentor as she moved from organizing to elected office. Along the way she earned a Master of Social Work at the University of California, Berkeley, and founded the Community Health Alliance for Neighborhood Growth and Education (CHANGE), which brought mental health services to East Bay neighborhoods. After leaving Dellums's staff in 1987, she built an Oakland facilities management firm that grew to more than 500 employees. She won a seat in the California Assembly in 1990, moved to the State Senate in 1996, and in 1998 won Dellums's seat in Congress when he retired.

The Lone Vote

On September 11, 2001, Lee was evacuated from the Capitol, kicking off her shoes to run as smoke rose from the Pentagon. On the morning of September 14, at the national memorial service, the dean's sermon gave her the line she would quote on the House floor that day.

Hours later, the House voted 420 to 1 to authorize the president to use force against anyone he determined was connected to the attacks. Lee cast the one vote against. The authorization, she warned, was a blank check without limits of time or place. "Let us not become the evil that we deplore," she said on the floor, quoting a member of the clergy.

She was called a traitor. She received death threats and needed a security detail. The authorization she opposed was later used to justify military action in more than a dozen countries over two decades. Lee spent years pressing Congress to repeal it, and in 2021 the House voted to repeal the separate 2002 Iraq war authorization, a measure she led.

Twenty-Six Years of Conscience

Lee's dissent was matched by a long record of building. She helped write the legislation that created PEPFAR in 2003, the global AIDS program credited with saving more than 25 million lives, much of it in Africa and the Caribbean, and pressed for funding for the Global Fund. She chaired the Congressional Black Caucus from 2009 to 2011, co-chaired the Congressional Progressive Caucus, and founded the Out of Poverty Caucus.

She also honored the woman who sent her to the registrar. When Lee arrived in Congress, there was no portrait of Chisholm in the Capitol and no stamp in her name. Lee pushed for both. Chisholm's portrait was unveiled in the Capitol in 2009, and the Postal Service issued a Chisholm Black Heritage stamp in 2014. The 2024 film Shirley, with Regina King as Chisholm and Christina Jackson as Lee, dramatized their bond.

The Road Back to Oakland

In 2024 Lee ran for the U.S. Senate seat once held by Dianne Feinstein and lost in the primary. Her House term ended in January 2025. By then Oakland was in crisis. Voters had recalled Mayor Sheng Thao in November 2024 amid a federal corruption investigation; the city faced a deep budget deficit, closing businesses and fear about public safety. Labor, clergy and longtime organizers urged Lee to run in the April 2025 special election as the one figure with the standing to steady the city.

She won narrowly over Loren Taylor. Eighteen months later, the share of residents who say Oakland is on the right track has nearly quadrupled, from 12 percent to 46 percent, according to the Oakland Chamber of Commerce poll. "Whether you voted for me or not, we are one Oakland," she told supporters Tuesday night. "You told me what you want and that's safer streets, cleaner neighborhoods, affordable housing, good jobs, strong businesses, addressing homelessness and a City Hall that works for you."

Why Mayors Matter

The strong-mayor measure matters. Mayors drive mobilization and set the local agenda, but in Oakland the office has had limited power to deliver. If the measure passes, Lee will have more authority to turn the coalition that elected her into results. As Keisha Lance Bottoms showed in Atlanta, City Hall can anchor local, state and national agendas.

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The Spear Reaches the Pacific

From Atlanta to Houston, Las Vegas, Denver and Oakland, the Sunbelt and the West are now the leading edge of multiracial democracy. Lee's path, from a Mills College organizer's question to City Hall in the Panthers' hometown, shows what one instruction to register can grow into over fifty years.

The record of that journey has come home, too. Lee's congressional papers, about 65 boxes spanning 1971 to 2016, are held in the Special Collections of the F.W. Olin Library at Mills College, now Northeastern University Oakland, the campus where she first asked Chisholm how to help. They include the transitional files from Dellums's office and the boxes of letters Americans sent her after the lone vote. Her Assembly and State Senate records rest at the African American Museum and Library at Oakland.

The series closes next with the organizers themselves.