By NCL CEO, Sally Greenberg

I was living in Boston in 1987 when a thunderclap of a headline hit the front page of the Boston Globe: Barney Frank was about to be outed over a relationship with a man he had hired as a “massage therapist,” and he decided to get ahead of the story himself.

In May 1987, U.S. Representative Barney Frank became the first member of Congress to voluntarily disclose that he was gay, making the announcement in an interview with the Globe. Motivated by both personal integrity and a desire to manage the growing press scrutiny, his decision was met with overwhelming support from constituents in his district. This was decades before Grindr, Tinder, Match.com, etc.; men (mostly) would place ads in gay papers with an unlisted phone number or go to a gay bar. But a closeted member of Congress couldn’t go do that and not be recognized. Frank described his dilemma in the interview: he was a lonely, overweight gay member of Congress with no means for finding romance or sex.

As a gay icon, Barney was a trailblazer. To younger generations, this may sound unremarkable now, but 39 years ago it was anything but. There were many gay members of Congress then, of course, but none who were out.

I moved to Washington in 1996, and over the years, I had several memorable interactions with Barney, as everyone called him. He was a legendary curmudgeon — cranky to the core —, and I had the dubious honor, like so many others, of being scolded by him after making some innocuous comment, possibly a question, about Israel needing stronger support in Congress. He snapped back, “You’re so immature.” I couldn’t help but laugh at why he chose those words to berate me. But it was almost a badge of honor to be on the receiving end of one of Barney’s rebukes — a little like making Nixon’s enemies list or being called “low IQ” by Donald Trump.

But the Barney Frank I remember most was the extraordinarily smart and wickedly funny man. He once quipped that Senator Dianne Feinstein had “more Jewish husbands than a room full of Hadassah members.” And when a fellow House member declared that America was a Christian nation, Barney famously shot back: ‘If this is a Christian nation, why did you drag this Jew out of bed to get here to listen to all of you?‘

He was also generous with his time, and despite being a curmudgeon, he also had a heart. I remember on one memorable occasion, my son Joe, then a junior in high school, was part of a group of students with Operation Understanding returning to Washington, DC from Mississippi. At the airport, they crossed paths with Barney, who was heading to Boston. At my prompting, he spent nearly half an hour speaking with the students about his experiences working on Freedom Summer in the early 1960s. For the young people on that trip, it was a rare opportunity to hear firsthand reflections from someone directly involved in a pivotal moment in the civil rights movement. That he would take the time to engage with these students — just because — showed the heart beneath the curmudgeon.

Most importantly, Barney was an iconic champion of so many causes: gay rights, consumer protection, and economic fairness.  For consumer advocates, he was a steadfast ally, a brilliant and innovative legislator who successfully navigated the enormously complex but critically important Dodd-Frank financial reform bill to rein in corporate abuses. Barney never hesitated to call out corporate misconduct, and he did so with honesty, humor, and conviction.

I send condolences to his friends, staffers, the LGBTQ community, and especially to his sister, Ann Lewis — a pioneering feminist, close confidante of Hillary Clinton, and someone with whom I’ve had the pleasure working for many years.

Rest in peace, Barney, and know we will never forget your enormous contributions.

By NCL CEO, Sally Greenberg

How is it possible that decades of civil rights advances can be wiped out in a single year?  Well, it may be happening as we speak. Because polling numbers show the White House and Republicans in danger of losing their narrow 5-seat majority in the US House of Representatives, there’s been pressure on Republican-controlled state legislatures to redistrict out Democratic seats in hopes of keeping their majority.

Many of these seats are held by African Americans: we currently have 6 African American Senators and 63 members of the House of Representatives. But that could change dramatically this year.

There’s a potential for 14 additional Republican seats from new districts in Texas, Florida, Missouri, North Carolina, Ohio, and Tennessee. This means that as many as 15 to 20 Black lawmakers’ seats are at risk, with the threat even greater after a recent Supreme Court ruling that severely weakened the Voting Rights Act.

After the Civil War, during the period known as Reconstruction, some 2,000 Black people held public office, from the local level to the U.S. Senate.

Jim Crow changed all that.  As described on PBS, the Jim Crow era was, “a formal, codified system of racial apartheid that dominated the American South for three-quarters of a century beginning in the 1890s. The laws affected almost every aspect of daily life, mandating segregation of schools, parks, libraries, drinking fountains, restrooms, buses, trains, and restaurants. “Whites Only” and “Colored” signs were constant reminders of the enforced racial order.”

Following the ratification in 1870 of the 15^th Amendment, which barred states from depriving citizens of the right to vote based on race, many states in the south launched measures to keep African-Americans from voting, such as literacy tests, primaries with all-white candidates, poll taxes, felony disenfranchisement laws, fraud, grandfather clauses, and other types of intimidation.

It looks like the practice of suppressing Black representation is on track to be repeated.  The wave of redrawn districts could bring the largest single-session drop in Black representation since 1877.

Why is this a concern for the National Consumers League? Because as our founders understood, racial discrimination is deeply tied to the violation of labor and consumer rights, and our mission is to promote both. Florence Kelley, NCL’s towering first General Secretary, was a signatory to the original charter of the NAACP in 1909, and her colleagues – Jane Addams, Florence Kelley, Clara Beyer, and many others – deplored Jim Crow discrimination.

In 1926, Kelley wrote to a colleague, “I write to call your attention to the shameful treatment by hotels of colored members of the Conference at Cleveland. The Statler Hotel was especially brutal. …I think there should be a written pledge from every hotel that there will be no race discrimination. Certainly, I should not dream of staying in any hotel which refused my fellow members either bed or board.” She also noted that her colleagues at the NAACP reported that Statler hotels wouldn’t allow Black people as guests or employees.

States also passed black codes limiting the jobs African Americans could hold, and their ability to leave a job once hired, and they restricted the kind of property Black people could own. African Americans faced social, commercial, and legal discrimination. Theatres, hotels, and restaurants segregated them in inferior accommodations or refused to admit them at all. Shops served them last. The Black Codes and Jim Crow Laws

Keeping Black Americans from representation in Congress was critical to Jim Crow. That changed with the historic voting rights laws and the court cases that upheld the law.

But here we are again – a Congress that is supportive of redistricting out Black representation and a Supreme Court that acts as an “amen chorus” for these discriminatory policies.

The potential loss of many Black members of Congress means silencing the voice of millions of African American constituents. We should not return to the bad old days of Jim Crow, but without fair representation, we lose the voices of so many who have stood  for labor and consumer rights of their African American constituents in Congress.

So is this Jim Crow 2.0? That’s what many – including me – fear. Historic turnout could change that.  This year’s elections will hopefully prove me wrong.