GODMOTHER OF TITLE IX

Today, as Title IX turns 48, we’re looking back at Bernice Sandler, the woman who turned a sexist insult into a policy that would help millions of women and girls. 

• Title IX is primarily known for increasing participation in women’s sports. Ever since it was signed into federal law in 1972, the number of women in college and high school sports has skyrocketed. 
• However, the law — which begins, “No person in the United States shall, on the basis of sex, be excluded from participation in, be denied the benefits of, or be subjected to discrimination under any education program or activity receiving Federal financial assistance” — is actually much broader. 
• For Congress and Sandler, sports weren't front of mind. 

• When she asked a colleague why she hadn’t been offered the job, he praised her qualifications before telling her: “But let's face it, you come on too strong for a woman."
• “Too strong for a woman” would become the rallying cry that launched Title IX, but Sandler’s initial reaction wasn’t righteous anger. “I went home and cried,” Sandler later wrote. “In short, I accepted the assessment that I was ‘too strong for a woman.’”

• Sandler researched tactics used by black civil rights activists to understand how she could apply them to women’s rights in academics. 
• In time, she found a footnote on a U.S. Commission on Civil Rights report: In 1968, President Lyndon B. Johnson had amended an executive order regarding federal contractors to include barring discrimination on the basis of sex. 
• Because many universities used federal contractors, Sandler concluded that the order applied to them. 

• In the summer of 1970, Green held hearings on women’s education and employment. Green hired Sandler to her subcommittee staff, which Sandler noted made her the “the first person ever appointed to the staff of a Congressional committee to work specifically in the area of women's rights.”

• But after pushback from Black leaders who worried that amending Title VI would weaken it, Green proposed Title IX, which was limited to educational activities and included amendments to the Equal Pay Act. Congress passed it on June 23, 1972.
• “The historic passage of Title IX was hardly noticed,” Sandler wrote. “I remember one or two sentences in the Washington papers.”

A Q&A with Jennifer McClellan

Last week, Virginia state Sen. Jennifer McClellan became the second black woman to declare her candidacy for governor of the state. The 2020 cycle is the first since Georgia Democrat Stacey Abrams narrowly lost her bid to become the first black woman governor in the country. 

Virginia is home to the country’s first elected black governor, Doug Wilder, who served from 1990 to 1994. America has only elected one other black governor in its history: Deval Patrick of Massachusetts. 

McClellan, a 15-year veteran of the Virginia legislature, spoke to The 19th about why she’s running now, and the political and racial climate in which she is launching her campaign. 

This interview by Errin Haines has been edited for length and clarity.

Why you, and why now?

We are at a critical moment in our commonwealth and our country’s history that we have only seen maybe five or six times in our nation’s history, where we are at a crossroads in deciding what kind of government and community and commonwealth we are going to be. Are we going to be one where government can and is a force for powerful and positive change, that solves people’s problems? Or are we going to be one where government is a benefit for some and oppression for others?

I learned from my parents’ life experiences and their parents’ life experiences that those are the two things that government can be. They grew up during the oppression of the segregated South, they lived through the civil rights movement. They've seen it all. They raised my sisters and me to believe we have to serve. I became a community leader and a political leader and a legislator because I wanted to make sure that government was solving people’s problems and not leaving anybody behind. 

I have a unique understanding of how Virginia got where we are today, steeped in my own family’s history and the commonwealth’s history. 

You are now the second black woman declaring your candidacy in Virginia. What do you make of this moment where we are seeing more black women standing for the highest offices? Why is this happening now?

We’ve been leading towards this moment from when the first black woman came to our shores. From the beginning, black women have been the backbone of our communities, of our economy, yet we have been relegated to the shadows for so long. We've been pushing forward, and we’re finally breaking through. 

It’s a moment when it's not just black women, but other women of color who said, “It’s time. It’s past time. And we’re just going to keep on pushing forward.” That’s what we’re doing.

Talk to me about some of the challenges and opportunities for women standing for an office like governor.

The biggest obstacle is just the perception that it can’t be done because it’s never been done. But we’ve got plenty of other examples in history that [show that just because it] hasn’t been done doesn’t mean it can’t be done. The confidence in pushing forward is the first step. 

The political playbook was written by and for white men. That’s started to erode, but in 2016, the playbook was ripped apart. Over the past two years — and especially when we’re facing a health pandemic, an economic crisis, a reckoning with racial injustice and a crisis of faith in government — any semblance of a playbook is gone. The challenge that black women have always faced is that the playbook wasn’t written for us. But I think Virginia and this country are at a point where they’re saying, “We don’t care what the playbook says. We care about what you are going to do to solve my problems and make my life better or make government get out of the way.” They’re going to look at a candidate and say, “Who can do that? That’s where I’m going to follow.”

I want to talk to you as somebody who has had to deal with a reckoning around race very recently, in Virginia. What were the lessons you learned? How would you bring that to the governor’s office?

Last year, in the wake of February [when it was revealed that Virginia Gov. Ralph Northam appeared in a racist yearbook photo depicting a person in KKK garb and a person in blackface], I was at a coffee with a group of multigenerational black women, just talking about how we felt about everything and the 400 years of trauma it triggered for each of us. And there was a young lady, she was just graduating college. She said: “All of you at this table have seen progress in your life. I was in elementary school when Barack Obama got elected president. The first election that I ever voted in was the 2016 election. All I have seen is regression. All I have seen is a dying planet, crippling debt and the American dream slipping away. Me and my generation are losing hope and asking, ‘Why bother?’”

I looked at her and said, “If you and your generation lose hope, we are lost as a commonwealth, as a country and as a society.” That really made me focus on pressing forward and helping bring her generation and every generation together to move us forward. 

My kids are 9 and 5. If the 20-year-olds are losing hope, what hope is there for my kids? I cannot leave to them the fight that I and my parents and my great-grandparents fought. We owe it to ancestors we don’t even know because they weren’t valued enough to put their names on paper. I owe it to them to push this fight forward so that my kids and their kids and their grandkids don’t have to fight the same fight. That is what is pushing me to run now. 

What is different from last year in Richmond and now, especially in terms of the pain you felt and how you dealt with that?

Let me take you back to 2017 and Charlottesville. Part of Virginia’s problem, and especially Richmond, is putting blinders on and not wanting to talk about that painful past, let alone deal with it. Charlottesville forced everybody to look at it. And we thought there was going to be movement and there wasn’t, really. 

And then the February scandal brought it all back, but with people we knew … We had to deal with it, and then we kind of stopped talking about it and it was back to business as usual.

What makes this different is nobody can deny it and everybody saw it. I was at the [Robert E.] Lee monument, and there was a young black family taking pictures with the black power symbol and we both were talking about feeling in the air that this is different. It was almost like God put everybody in time out and said, “Now you have to look at and reckon with this inequity. First you see it with coronavirus, and you’re going to see it in the economic crisis, and now I'm going to show it to you in the criminal justice system. And you’re going to watch a man die on the internet on national television and you cannot turn away.” 

This is a moment very similar to 1968, where the horror of Bull Connor and his dogs and his fire hoses and the Vietnam War came into people’s homes and you couldn’t turn away. And that commitment across generations, across races, across genders, saying, “Enough. It is time to deal with it now.” —Errin Haines

BIG DECISION

Any day now, the Supreme Court is expected to rule on June Medical Services v. Russo. The ruling centers on a Louisiana law requiring doctors who perform abortions to have admitting privileges at a hospital within 30 miles of the clinic. 

If the law is upheld, there will be only one clinic left for the 10,000 women who seek abortions in Louisiana each year.