This week has brought notice of the death of two political figures from the past: Lindy Boggs and Harry Byrd, Jr. Both in their late 90s and had been out of office and out of the news for a number of
This week has brought notice of the death of two political figures from the past: Lindy Boggs and Harry Byrd, Jr. Both in their late 90s and had been out of office and out of the news for a number of years. But it is notable that although of similar age and from the south, they were opposites when it came to civil rights.
Lindy Boggs was the window of House Speaker Hale Boggs who died in a plane crash in Alaska. I remember when this happened in 1972, I was moving out of my student movement phase and beginning to take an interest in electoral politics. Boggs ran to replace him following a tradition of widows taking over for their politician husbands. Boggs, however, was different. She went on to serve nine terms in Congress (several of them representing a majority black district) and become a champion of women’s rights and civil rights while representing Louisiana. The New York Times describes some of her legislative efforts.
The velvet Southern charm she had absorbed growing up on two Louisiana plantations was her not-so-secret weapon.
She displayed it early in her first term when the House banking committee was composing an amendment to a lending bill banning discrimination on the basis of race, age or veteran status. She added the words “sex or marital status,” ran to a copying machine and made a copy for each member.
In her memoir she recalled saying: “Knowing the members composing this committee as well as I do, I’m sure it was just an oversight that we didn’t have ‘sex’ or ‘marital status’ included. I’ve taken care of that, and I trust it meets with the committee’s approval.”
Thus was sex discrimination prohibited by the Equal Credit Opportunity Act of 1974.
I always loved that story.
Mrs. Boggs used her membership on the Appropriations Committee to push for other women’s economic concerns, like equal pay for government jobs and equal access to government business contracts. She became a champion of historic preservation and port development, flood control and housing in her New Orleans district.
Mrs. Boggs championed racial justice at a time when doing so invited the resentment if not hostility of most Southern whites. She saw the grow