(taken from sunspot.net on 2/5/01)
by
Kate Shatzkin
Sun Staff
Originally published Feb 5 2001
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Things were better for people like her than in the little Southern towns where her husband traveled in his job reorganizing the U.S. Postal Service - places where he wasn't even welcome to stay overnight.
In the district, blacks had good jobs. They worked for the government. They lived in a majority black city. Their lives unfolded in the shadow of the U.S. Capitol and the Washington Monument, potent symbols of America's unique freedoms.
Yet residents of the district couldn't so much as choose where their kids could fly a kite without the permission of politicians - usually white - from states thousands of miles away.
With the flick of a pen, a white Congressman from Kentucky could scratch 17 new music teachers from the district education budget. "Y'all can sing and dance," Lett-Simmons remembers him saying. "You don't need music teachers."
Moments like that would cleave Lett-Simmons to one of the longest-running lost causes the capital city has ever seen: the quest to be a state of its own. So years later, when it was time for the crazy, hard-fought presidential election of 2000 - time for every voter to choose and every vote to count - Barbara Lett-Simmons, one of three district members of the Electoral College, chose between two things she loved. And she chose the longest shot of all.
The small African-American septuagenarian, wearing a fur hat, left the line blank where she once planned to endorse Al Gore, a Democrat she has admired for years. Instead, she stood to protest D.C.'s lack of representation in Congress. She called it what she thought it was: A colony.
Of the 538 members of that obscure animal known as the Electoral College, Lett-Simmons became the only one to defect from the intentions of the voters she represented.
In the agonizingly long 36 days that followed a presidential election that would not die, Lett-Simmons' act of protest ended up a mere footnote, another strange turn made pedestrian by the chaos that preceded it. To some of her dyed-in-the-wool Democratic colleagues, it was much more - an act of treachery.
Those whose last, vain hope for victory depended on a few of George W. Bush's electors to turn their way instead lost one of their own. In the weeks afterward, Lett-Simmons would find herself on the wrong end of angry phone calls, and of silence from some of her best friends.
For one day, though, the blank ballot was reported from Jerusalem to London as the only deviation in a process few Americans, in any other year, pay attention to at all.
And that's all Barbara Lett-Simmons wanted.
"I'm an educator," she said. "I prefer to believe I know the teachable moment."
Like most of her fellow "colonists," Barbara Lett-Simmons came to the district from somewhere else.
She grew up in Battle Creek, Mich., the ninth of 12 children born to Benjamin Harrison Lett and Jessie Proctor Lett. Her father was a contractor with a coal company; her mother stayed home to raise all those children.
Barbara was on the debate team in high school, and it was a debate scholarship that got her to Western Michigan University. That's where she met Sam Simmons, the man she would marry her senior year, and the man to whom she is still married 51 years later. She became a teacher, fullfilling a dream she'd had since childhood.
When the Simmons family came to Washington, Lett-Simmons started getting involved in her new hometown. She served on the boards of the Washington Urban League, the Mental Health Association of D.C. and the Board of Education. That's when, she says, she came to understand what she calls "the colonial mentality" of people who live in the nation's capital.
Afraid of losing what power they had, they feared asking for more.
Residents of the District of Columbia have never had their own representatives in Congress. Their one delegate, Eleanor Holmes Norton, can't vote on the House floor. They've voted in presidential elections only since 1964, been able to elect their own mayor and city council only since 1974.
But the rest of the country - and the world - hasn't much cared.
Just four months ago, the U.S. Supreme Court affirmed a lower court ruling that district residents don't have a right to a voting representative. The battle now shifts to Congress, where a Republican majority takes a dim view of giving more power to what has become the nation's most diehard Democratic jurisdiction.
For another thing, the district has been losing residents for years. It has only about 500,000 now, compared with 800,000 half a century ago. As states go, only Wyoming has fewer people.
Some people say the district should just become part of another state, Maryland or Virginia. But, asks Lett-Simmons, what state would want D.C., with its wonkish transients, its large swaths of have-nots, its miles of untaxable federal land?
With the district's cause as her own, Lett-Simmons went on to become active in Democratic politics. She has been a delegate to every Democratic National Convention since 1976. She was elected as Democratic national committeewoman for the district in 1998. Last fall, Norm Neverson, chair of the Democratic state committee for the district, put up her name as an elector.
Electors, after all, are traditionally chosen for their faithfulness to the party in question. And who had been more faithful than Barbara Lett-Simmons? Who was in so many pictures with Bill Clinton, and Hillary? Who would you have expected to lay down her life, if necessary, for the Democrats?
Surprise.
In any other election, Dec. 18, the day of the Electoral College vote, would have passed with little notice, its conclusion foregone. In the beginning, Lett-Simmons fully expected to vote for Gore. As the vote approached, she thought she might make a statement afterward, too, calling for statehood.
But this wasn't turning out to be just any year.
As the fighting in Florida wore on - over butterfly ballots and confused senior citizens and recounts of recounts - the absurdity of it all began to change her mind. Gore's final concession made the decision firm.
Lett-Simmons called her friend Donna Brazile, Gore's campaign manager, the night before the meeting of the Electoral College. She left a message stating her intentions.
The next morning, she appeared on a television show and declared that she was going to do less - and more - with her vote. She was going to leave it blank.
"If you have a vote that is limited, that's a mind game to make you think you got something," Lett-Simmons said. "You don't have what's real."
She was tired of the claim that it was enough to be able to vote for mayor; enough to give Norton a little more power; enough to exercise this meaningless vote for president when the courts were really deciding the election.
Later that morning, Brazile began calling a phone number she has had memorized for about 20 years, the number of the woman she calls "one of our political mothers."
She got her friend's answering machine.
"I didn't know you were going to cast your ballot against Gore," Brazile said into the recorder. "There may be two coming over to us from Colorado. We desperately need that electoral vote." Now she was pleading. "If you can please reconsider. "
Brazile believed the statehood cause was well and good. She had supported it throughout her political life. And Al Gore, she knew, had been one of its strongest supporters ever - one of three co-sponsors of an original statehood bill that failed. Now, he'd gotten 86 percent of the presidential vote in the district. Eighty-six percent! If that didn't express the will of the people, she didn't know what would.
Brazile had her message rehearsed. It was powerful. She was charming.
It was too late.
Around noon, three electors gathered in the District City Council chambers.
Bill Simons, the district's Democratic national committeeman, planned to make a statement about statehood, too. But he was clear on this: He would cast his vote for Gore.
So would Nadine Winter, the other elector.
Simons knew what Lett-Simmons intended to do. He has known her for some 20 years, and he knew this as well: Trying to change her mind would be pointless.
"Why waste your breath?" is all he'll say about that.
Lett-Simmons sat a while, crafting her sentence of protest. Finally, she wrote: "This blank ballot is cast for all the colonists of the District of Columbia."
She stood before a bank of television cameras to quote the Revolutionary activist James Otis: "Taxation without representation is tyranny."
The chambers erupted with a standing ovation from the audience, which included former D.C. mayor Marion Barry.
Nearby, Brazile was waiting to hear what had happened - and still hoping to reach Lett-Simmons in time to change the ballot before it was certified.
Time has passed since. Brazile has been to Hawaii, has had time to breathe out the noxious fumes of this bitterly fought election. She has had time to think about Barbara Lett-Simmons, and to forgive her in her heart.
But still she wonders why she lost this one vote, from the truest blue of Democratic friends.
"A vote for Al Gore would have been a vote for statehood," Brazile says. "It would have been a vote for civil rights. A vote for affirmative action. A vote for urban America.
"My point is, did her vote count?"
Afterward, the first phone call came from a gay man. He said he had AIDS, that he had long fought for a voice in the political process. Like Donna Brazile, he wasn't happy.
"He said, 'Girl, you better be ready for a fight,'" Lett-Simmons recalled. "He said, 'I resent that you would take a third of my votes away. He said, 'I'm going to see that you can no longer wear that name' " of elector.
Then a guy named Mark S. Morgan weighed in with a letter. "Shame on you for playing politics with my vote, and others like me," he wrote before honing in for the kill - comparing Lett-Simmons to one of the election's most reviled players, Florida Secretary of State Katherine Harris.
The media wasn't much kinder. Slate magazine likened her non-vote to "protesting a famine by going on a hunger strike." Headlines called her "the faithless elector," a label that still gets her dander up. She never thought she'd find herself in agreement with the Washington Times, but they called her a "maverick" instead, and she likes that better.
And then there was the silence from friends like Brazile, which to Lett-Simmons made its own nasty sound.
But there was support, too. Christmas cards still line every inch of her front door, and the walls on the side. Front and center, right under the window, is a Christmas card picturing the Gore family looking serene on a sunny beach. "It was the first one I got," Lett-Simmons says proudly.
One man called to tell her she was a hero.
Eleanor Holmes Norton, the district's delegate, came out in public to say Lett-Simmons did the right thing. "It made a difference," Norton said. "It'll stick with people. Every time there is an electoral count, they'll go down and see what was done in previous years, and it'll be there."
And then there was Ina B. Daniels McGee from Dallas.
She showed up at a press conference Lett-Simmons had to launch her latest campaign for a D.C. state, which her group calls "New Columbia." The room in the Sumner School Museum and Archives - the district's first public school for black children - was sparsely populated with only a few reporters, a few supporters. Outside, the city was preparing for opening ceremonies for Bush's inauguration, an event that seemed destined to doom the effort just as it was getting off the ground.
Lett-Simmons stood alone at a microphone to announce the members of her new national statehood committee. The committee has some impressive names: Terry McAuliffe, Bill Clinton's most effective fund-raiser; Norton; Benjamin Hooks, former executive director of the NAACP. But Lett-Simmons had to admit her committee has no money yet, other than what her husband has supplied to create red buttons that say "51," for the 51st state.
Ina, though, made things look a little brighter.
She appeared wearing a red cowboy hat, a red military-style suit with gold trim, red high heels and red hair, with two American flags sticking out of her glossy shopping bag.
Like the rest of the world, she'd seen Lett-Simmons' protest vote on TV. "Yellow dog Democrat" though she is, Ina loved it. She thought: This is the start of something big.
So on a dreary January day, with the power of Democrats draining from the capital city like the sun from the gray sky, Ina detoured from the inaugural and Martin Luther King Jr. Day events she'd come to see. She wanted to get a picture with the "faithless" elector.
Ina's husband was behind the camera. The two women stood together, the tall Texan and the tiny colonist.
And in that frozen moment, if nowhere else, Barbara Lett-Simmons' vote counts.
The Archives of Maryland Documents for the Classroom series of the Maryland State Archives was designed and developed by Dr. Edward C. Papenfuse and Dr. M. Mercer Neale. This packet was prepared with the assistance of Kathy Beard, Nancy Bramucci, Jim Dowdy, Roger Kizer Ball, Greg Lepore, Lynne MacAdam, John Maranto, Ryan Polk, Julie Price, R. J. Rockefeller, Emily Oland Squires, and other members of the Archives staff. MSA SC 2221-31. Publication no. 2090.
For further inquiries, please contact Dr. Papenfuse at edp@mdarchives.state.md.us or phone MD toll free 800-235-4045 or 410-260-6401
© Copyright January 2001 Maryland State Archives.
Standing
alone: Barbara
Lett-Simmons, long a Democratic Party stalwart in the nation's capital,
has received a lot of angry responses, and some support, for publicizing
the issue of D.C. statehood by refusing to cast her Electoral College ballot
for Al Gore. (Sun photo by David Hobby)