Born: 5 October 1932, United States
Died: NA
Country most active: United States
Also known as: Perle Yvonne Watson, Yvonne Brathwaite
The following is republished from the U.S. Congress. This piece falls under under public domain, as copyright does not apply to “any work of the U.S. Government” where “a work prepared by an officer or employee of the U.S. Government as part of that person’s official duties” (See, 17 U.S.C. §§ 101, 105).
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
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?”
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.”
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.
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.
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.”
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.
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.
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.