ARCHIVES OF LEAD STORIES

 

 

July 22, 2004

Veteran political activist plays key role in Kerry campaign

Virgil Wright

Ayanna Pressley, who juggled Sen. John Kerry’s schedule for six years, scoffs at the notion that President Bush couldn’t find time to address last week’s NAACP convention.

“You know as a scheduler that if it’s important, you’ll find a way.

That’s just part of the job,” says Pressley, shrugging as she sips a tall glass of water with lemon at a downtown restaurant. “No matter what, you make it work.”

Just behind Pressley, the television above the restaurant bar shows a live telecast of Kerry on the podium in Philadelphia with NAACP leaders Kwesi Mfume and chairman Julian Bond, both partisan Democrats who have clashed with the White House on policies ranging from housing to homeland security.

Did Bush make the right choice to skip the event?

“From my point of view, it’s one of the best things that could’ve happened for the senator, so yes, the president made an excellent choice.”

Pressley’s smile and soft Chicago accent, more southern than South Side, takes the edge off her sarcasm, but it’s clear she’s as serious as a campaign contribution — no theory, all business.

To Pressley, politics is a practical art. She possesses no shortage of idealism. But while others dream, she delivers, stitching together impossible demands with implausible goals to turn rhetoric into reality.

From 1997 to 2002, she served as the only African American scheduler on the Senate side of the U.S. Capitol, where she was a key architect of the daunting logistics to mount a run for the Democratic nomination.

She currently runs Kerry’s constituency operation from his Massachusetts campaign office, coordinating the work of affinity groups ranging from veterans and environmentalists to small business owners to support the candidate with ideas, energy, and field-work. Pressley also consults with the Democratic National Convention to produce podium programs airing during prime-time, with several to focus on the work of civil rights heroes.

Like most operatives during her years on Capitol Hill, Pressley worked out of public view, routinely spending 15-hour days at her desk next to the senator’s office. Committee hearings, Senate votes, policy debates, media appearances, fundraisers, flights, family time, even exercise and vacation get-aways all came through multiple phone, fax, and email lines to get booked in the master schedule.

In some ways, a good scheduler becomes a principle’s alter ego, anticipating needs while protecting his time and preserving his energy.

During Sen. Kerry’s visit last week to the new Hampton Inn in Roxbury, Pressley received a rare public acknowledgement for years of faithful service. At the end of his remarks, the senator took a moment to praise Pressley and then called her to the podium.

“What do we think of Ayanna Pressley? Don’t we love her?” he announced, turning her like a trophy to face the massed press corps.

Pressley arrived in the high-ceilinged chambers of the Russell Senate Office Building at age 22, already a veteran of three campaigns and three years of constituent work in the Boston office of U.S. Rep. Joseph P. Kennedy II. She had coordinated volunteers during Kerry’s 1996 re-election battle against Gov. Weld and was coming in to replace a scheduler who had worked for Sen. Hubert Humphrey before joining Kerry’s staff and who knew the Hill better than most Members of Congress.

“Sen. Kerry put a great deal of faith in me. Like most schedulers, I was a woman, but I wasn’t white and I didn’t have an advanced degree and I didn’t know Washington and I didn’t know Capitol Hill, but I did have one thing going for me — Sen. Kerry trusted me and in some way turned over his life to me.”

To Pressley, the scheduling post was a consuming political education and another step in a widening orbit of public service. But she missed activism, the word on the street, the shouts and elbows of caucus rooms and meeting halls.

“I feel like a cop who once worked a beat and then was promoted to lieutenant and got stuck on a desk. I was just a cop who was dying to get back on my beat,” says Pressley. Kerry reluctantly sent her to the Massachusetts campaign, where she rode the ups and downs of the primary season, from front-runner to also-ran, and then back to the top following the stirring Iowa come-back.

Growing up on the Near North Side of Chicago, Pressley learned to endure the vicissitudes of fate from her mother Sandra, a tenant advocate hired by the Urban League to work in the tough Cabrini Green projects. She also schooled her daughter in the lessons of civic engagement.

For the first ten years of her life, Pressley accompanied her mother throughout the notorious high-rises, meeting with residents ill-equipped to overcome disputes with school officials, housing authority bureaucrats, police, and social workers.

She attended an elite private school in Lincoln Park and shuttled back and forth between home and the lakeside academy aboard a CTA bus. She was class president, student government president, and commencement speaker in her high school. At Boston University, she was elected student government president for the College of Liberal Arts.

“I didn’t pursue politics. It called me and I just owned it. My mother had a deep faith in service and taught me that to whom much is given much is expected. I have always believed that and tried to act on it,” she says.

Pressley grew up an only child in a single-parent home. Her father was absent, serving time in prison.

“My father is a brilliant man who made mistakes and paid for them. He went wayward like a lot of brothers, but has totally transformed his life. I am very proud of him.”

Pressley leans across the table. “One of the reasons I support John Kerry is that he understands the struggle of young brothers to change their lives. He wants to end the practice of marginalizing communities of color by taking away the rights of felons to vote — that’s just another way of blocking people of color from influencing the political process. And as a former prosecutor, he understands the disparities in our justice system and wants to change them.”

Pressley checks her watch. It’s 8 p.m., time to return to the office for another round of meetings. As for her role in a possible Kerry administration, she brushes off the question with professional modesty.

“I’m trying to get John Kerry elected to the White House and I’m not thinking of Ayanna Pressley. No matter what I do, I know that if he’s elected, everything I care about will be easier to accomplish.”

 

Back to Lead Story Archives

Home Page