Donna F Edwards - Infinite Women

Born: 28 June 1958, United States
Died: NA
Country most active: United States
Also known as: NA

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 2008, Donna F. Edwards won a special election to become the first African-American woman elected to Congress from Maryland. In her nine years in the U.S. House of Representatives, Edwards earned a reputation as a leading progressive who worked to raise the minimum wage, invest in scientific research, and protect women from domestic violence. “People do want change,” she said during her primary campaign in 2008. “And the question is whether they have enough confidence and courage. Change is liberating, but it’s hard.”

Donna Edwards was born in Yanceyville, North Carolina, on June 28, 1958, the second of six children. Her father, John Edwards, served in the United States Air Force, and her mother, Mary, was a homemaker. The family moved frequently with each new duty assignment. After attending high school in New Mexico, Edwards graduated from Thomas Stone High School in Waldorf, Maryland, and completed a bachelor’s degree in English from North Carolina’s Wake Forest University in 1980. After college, Edwards worked as an assistant director for the United Nations Development Program before moving into the private sector. She later worked as a project engineer for an aerospace company at NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center, in Greenbelt, Maryland. In 1989, she earned a law degree from Franklin Pierce Law Center in Concord, New Hampshire. Edwards married and had one son, Jared, before she divorced her husband. During the separation, Edwards and her son briefly experienced homelessness, relying on a food pantry for meals, before moving in with her mother.

After law school, Edwards worked for a handful of nonprofit advocacy groups in the Washington, DC, area. “I have a passion for working in the nonprofit sector,” she recalled. In 1992, she joined Public Citizen and Congress Watch to advocate on consumer issues. Two years later, she moved to the Center for a New Democracy, where she worked on campaign finance reform and rose to the position of executive director. In 1996, she helped found and led the National Network to End Domestic Violence—an issue she confronted in her own marriage. In 2000, Edwards became the executive director of the Arca Foundation, a social equity and justice advocacy group.

In 2006, Edwards challenged seven-term incumbent Representative Albert Russell Wynn in the Democratic primary for a seat in the U.S. House of Representatives from Maryland’s Fourth Congressional District. The district, which was 57 percent Black and had a large population of federal workers, straddled Prince George’s and Montgomery Counties and bordered Washington, DC. With her well-funded campaign, Edwards challenged Wynn’s support for the Iraq War and the George W. Bush administration’s energy policy as well as his ties with the business community. Her campaign gained momentum when bloggers online publicized her candidacy, drawing funds and celebrity endorsements from Barbra Streisand, Danny Glover, and Gloria Steinem. But Wynn narrowly staved off Edwards’s challenge that year, winning with 50 percent to her 46 percent.

Edwards filed her candidacy for a rematch against Wynn in May 2007. By the 2008 Democratic primary, Edwards had won the endorsement of MoveOn.org, the National Organization for Women, and EMILY’s List. Edwards refused to accept contributions from political action committees and criticized Wynn for accepting campaign donations from special interests. Edwards won the 2008 primary, taking 59 percent of the vote to Wynn’s 37 percent. When Wynn resigned at the end of May, Maryland officials set a special election for June 17. Edwards won the special election over Republican challenger Peter James, a technology developer, 81 percent to 18 percent. She went on to win the full term later that fall and easily won reelection in all her subsequent races, even after redistricting in 2012 cut out the Montgomery County portions of her district and expanded its boundaries eastward to include Republican areas in Anne Arundel County.

Edwards’s House committee assignments reflected her constituents’ interests and concerns. Not only was she a former NASA employee, but her district sat adjacent to world-renowned Goddard Space Flight Center. Her district was also home to thousands of federal workers who commuted daily to the nation’s capital, often through heavy traffic. With those considerations in mind, Edwards was appointed to the Science and Technology Committee (which was renamed Science, Space, and Technology in 2011) and to the Transportation and Infrastructure. She also served on the Ethics Committee during the 112th Congress (2011–2013).

Edwards used her seat on the Science, Space, and Technology Committee to support NASA funding and boost measures encouraging minority education in science and mathematics. On Transportation and Infrastructure, Edwards took an interest in mass transit legislation, specifically rail projects in the Washington metropolitan area. She used her seat on the committee to question federal agencies about the lack of funding for projects in her district and Prince George’s County, “making them answer questions about why there was this kind of disparity and pushing them to open up the doors of opportunity for this majority African-American county,” she later said. She promoted the addition of rail service to connect the two northern ends of the Washington Metropolitan Area Transit Authority system (commonly called Metro) with a new purple line and called on officials to investigate the possibility of rail service on the Woodrow Wilson Bridge connecting Maryland to Virginia south of the District.

On national issues, Edwards supported a resolution to withdraw U.S. forces from Afghanistan and remained critical of the pace of the troop withdrawal from Iraq. In 2008, she only voted for the financial-services bailout after a direct appeal by Democratic presidential nominee Barack Obama. Edwards was a strong advocate for universal health care, having gone for nearly two years without health insurance before she started her nonprofit career. An illness during that period left her with medical debt. “It contributed greatly to the way I think about the health care system,” she said of her experience. “If I had been able to [get help] early on and get $20 worth of antibiotics, it would have saved me thousands of dollars, and it would have saved the system thousands of dollars.” She cosponsored several bills to provide Medicare for all Americans and authored a provision in the Affordable Care Act that empowers state insurance commissioners to review health insurance rate increases to prevent unjustified price hikes. Two of her recurring pieces of legislation included the WAGES Act—introduced in 2009, 2011, and 2013—which sought to raise the national minimum wage for tipped employees, and her 21st Century Investment Act—introduced in the 111th through the 114th Congress (2009–2017)—which would have improved the tax incentives for conducting research and development in the United States.

Edwards assisted in candidate recruitment for the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee (DCCC) in 2012 before being tapped by Democratic Leader Nancy Pelosi of California to lead the effort in 2014. Edwards later said she enjoyed “talking to prospective candidates to recruit them, but also identifying candidates that hadn’t come through the traditional sources by calling my friends in organized labor and my friends in the nonprofit sector across the country saying, ‘Who do you know?’” Alongside her campaign work, Edwards served as co-chair of the Democratic Steering and Policy Committee, which determined committee assignments and helped drive the party’s agenda in the House. “She’s already achieved a status in the caucus, title or not, as a go-to person, a leader,” Pelosi said of Edwards in 2014. Although she made significant inroads in her party’s caucus, she failed to develop a similar rapport within the Congressional Black Caucus (CBC). “I defeated their guy,” she reflected, referring to her predecessor Albert Wynn. “I think some people never really got over that.”

When Barbara Ann Mikulski announced her retirement from the U.S. Senate, Edwards declared her candidacy for the open seat in March 2015, pledging to champion “the middle-class American dream.” She quickly won the endorsement of EMILY’s List and other progressive groups, but the CBC refused to endorse either her or her Democratic challenger, fellow Maryland Representative Christopher Van Hollen. Edwards ended up losing to Van Hollen in the primary, 53 to 39 percent. In her concession speech, Edwards voiced a number of concerns about the future of her party, including issues she had faced in the House. “What I want to know from my Democratic Party is, when will the voices of people of color, when will the voices of women, when will the voices of labor, when will the voices of black women, when will our voices be effective, legitimate equal leaders in a big-tent party?”1

After finishing her term in the 114th Congress (2015–2017), Edwards got behind the wheel of an RV she christened “Lucille” and drove around the country, visiting national parks and spending time at historic sites, including the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama. She used the trip to connect to people and places “who are not centered around Washington,” she said in an interview midway through her travels. Improving access and opportunities for underrepresented communities remained forefront during her cross-country trip. “There are 104 women who serve in the United States Congress, a very small percentage of them are Black and Brown women,” she said in 2017. “We need many more women in every step of our elected office.” Edwards also worked as a political commentator and newspaper columnist.