BOND: Who are the people who have been most significant in shaping you, in creating you, in helping you develop?

BRAUN: Well, other than my parents which is pretty obvious, I've been blessed to have people come into my life at pivotal moments and make all the difference. When I dropped out of college, dropped out of high school really, a fellow by the name of Larry Hawkins who's still at the University of Chicago, essentially just turned my whole vision around and suggested to me that I could go on. In those days, they called it broadening your horizons, so Larry Hawkins made a great difference at that point in my life. When I got to -- I'm probably leaving somebody out, but when I got to the state legislature a woman named Ethel Alexander who was elected at the same time that I was, but she was a generation older -- in fact, I'm old enough to be her daughter or young enough to be her daughter -- she made a huge difference, so there're people along the way who touched my life at times when I might've taken one road or another and by their influence in my life, made a big difference.

BOND: Now, you mentioned your mother and father a moment ago and said that they weren't Bohemians, but they were people living in the artistic world and had people in the house. What about them?

BRAUN: Oh, well, my parents had an unusual marriage to begin with. I mean, it was a tumultuous marriage, but at the same time -- and they were opposites. My mother was very -- she called it "firesides and slippers." She wasn't social. She wasn't -- she had a little group of people that gravitated to her. She was very, in that regard, seen kind of as an earth mother that attracted people, but she wasn't all that outgoing. My father, on the other hand, was very outgoing and was involved in movements and causes and always engaged with the outside world and so as a result, he wound up -- he was a police officer or in law enforcement in some role or another as his day gig, if you will, but he played seven instruments and so he played the saxophone part-time professionally and so because he was in the Sol Hicks Band. I actually have a picture of the band and my mother sitting on the sidelines. I guess she was singing that night or something, so he played in a band and the result was that the musicians of that day, that time, were very much a part of our household and so [when] I grew up I knew Gene Ammons. I knew Byrd, Charlie Parker.

BOND: Charlie Parker?

BRAUN: Absolutely. Thelonious Monk. My aunt dated Dexter Gordon for a while, so all these musicians were around as I was growing up and in addition to the musicians, there were the artists. You know, inevitably where you find musicians, you find artists, and so I just grew up around the arts and that -- I don't know if by osmosis or otherwise, but that also I think influenced my world view.

BOND: I read some place that you described the difference between your mother and father as the difference between Booker T. Washington and W.E.B. Du Bois. How did that play out?

BRAUN: That's exactly right. I didn't realize I had done that, but, yes, that's exactly right. Well, because she was very much. In fact, she had an expression that "You grow where you're planted." You do the best job you can where you're planted, and her expression was whether you're a street sweeper or the president of the United States, you do the best job you can at what you're doing and be proud of your work, so she was very much a "This is the job, this is the task, focus on not having ambitions, not seeing a world outside of the home and the family as being all that relevant."

He, on the other hand, did see the world and was very concerned about what was going on in the world and did what he could in his way to make a difference and to change things and so his social activism I think was borne of that and so I grew up, again, in addition to the musicians and the artists, I met my first -- I met a woman by the name of Anna Langford. [She] was the first black female alderwoman in Chicago, and he took me to Anna Langford's office when I was eleven so that I would meet a black woman alderman, and there was another woman judge, Edith Sampson, and he took me to meet her. We went around. He was very -- again, he had this broad mind and so we were raised Catholic. That was kind of a family compromise, but we went to and explored other religions with him and he would take us to everything from Buddhist temples and the Hindus temples; the Baha'i Temple, of course, there in Chicago; Jewish synagogues, the Muslims, the Moslems, the Zoroastrians. I mean, as a child we would go to mass on Sunday and then either on the Saturday before or on the Sunday, we'd go to some other service once a month and so I had a chance to, again, without knowing that was part of my education, learn about world religions from a very early age.

BOND: Very quickly back to Anna Langford, do you think this put something in your mind that "I could do this some day" ?

BRAUN: I don't think so. I mean, it's like kids, you take them and you try to expose them and they go "ah ah." I think that was kind of my attitude was like "ah, I don't." No, I don't. In fact, I didn't -- I didn't think of myself as -- I didn't envision or envisage a political career at all until I was running for office, for all intents and purpose. I mean it just, it wasn't something that I thought of as having any real relevance to my own career.

BOND: What about your grandmother?

BRAUN: Well, I had two very different grandmothers. My mother's mother, my grandmother I called my saint and guardian angel. She was a very -- she was the one who went to Mass every morning; every day she went to Mass. Lived a very structured life, very calm life. Well, her life actually was filled with tragedy, but later when I knew her, by the time I got up, she was a person in whom I found great refuge and nurturing and comfort and guidance.

My other grandmother was hell on wheels. I can say it even -- I'm sorry [laughs] and she was a black nationalist. She was what the men -- they were called race men, but she was -- and also what today is being called a revert. That's to say her family had been Muslims from North Africa, I gather. That's kind of getting lost in the midst of time, but anyway, she became a Muslim and so I actually went with her to hear Elijah Muhammed speak. I‘ve seen her. In fact, there was a convention in Gary, Indiana, in 1972 and I went under the auspices of -- somebody at that time was one of the mentors, Dick Newhouse, and I looked up and there's this little woman coming down the walk through the gymnasium, some big gymnasium, and she had on the Muslim garb and I looked at her and I said, "Mama Liz, what are you doing here?" She said, "I'm here to be with my people, the Ethiops are gathering" so, she had been very much, again, a black nationalist and very into not being -- into being a Muslim and so she practiced kind of the amalgamation of Muslim beliefs that Elijah Muhammed represented.

BOND: And what about your father's political activism? How did that come to you, wash off on you?

BRAUN: Well, actually, again, his political activism, I didn't really -- it was a generation apart, you know, but he worked for the first -- he was always against the machine and this is important in terms of Chicago politics, because people think of Chicago politics and they think of the Daley machine. Well, there was always a group of independents out there who saw the machine as antithetical to the civil rights movement, antithetical to good government and honesty and reform in government and that was always the side of the equation that he found that he was on or found himself on.

And so he worked in the campaign of the first, one of the early black politicians to challenge the Daley machine. That was Charlie Chew. Charlie Chew ran as a reform candidate and my father was in real estate at that time and the office that he and his partner had, when they had a meeting for Charlie Chew, the city inspectors came and told them that the water was leaking and the gas was "dah dah," so they basically shut them down and put them out of business for a little while. So you can imagine there was no small amount of real anger and antipathy toward the Daley machine in our household. It was funny, too, because years later, of course, I got to know Rich Daley, the son, and there was no small amount of irony. I don't think Rich Daley ever really understood or appreciated what a big leap that was for me because our household had been absolutely just anti-Daley down the road.

BOND: But was there dinner table discussion about politics, about the machine, about Illinois politics?

BRAUN: Yes.

BOND: United States politics, all of that, going on?

BRAUN: Yes. Partly -- he wasn't so much. He was active in local campaign efforts and in union campaign efforts and things like putting people to work on the street. There was a streetcar fight, you know, to get people, blacks, jobs working for the transportation company. He would do things like that, but his political vision was really more national and international so I don't remember him as being involved with state of Illinois politics as national and international. My father very often wouldn't vote -- not very often. I don't think he voted in primaries really because he thought that as far as he was concerned he shouldn't have to declare which party he belonged to.

BOND: Now, does his political activism account for this sit-in you staged when you were a teenager?

BRAUN: Probably. You know, I didn't expect it to be that. I didn't expect I'd be staging a sit-in, but you know, it happened and so that just seemed to me to be the right thing to do was just not move and so I didn't.

BOND: And a moment ago you mentioned marching with Dr. King in the housing struggles in Chicago. Tell us about that. How old were you then?

BRAUN: I think I was 15 and I'd have to check. I was either 15 or 16. I was still in high school and my mother had cautioned me, you know, again. By this point they were spilt up and we were with my mother and I remember her saying "You don't want to get mixed up with that, you might get in trouble, there's bound to be trouble," and, of course, that was just my sign that, "Oh, I just had to go obviously to the march at that point."

So I went over and we marched down I think it was 67th Street. I have a sense that we marched down Marquette Boulevard to get to Gage Park and I was paired with a veteran, a guy who had marched in the South, a white guy who had marched in the South, and there were some nuns in front of me. I remember it just as vividly as if it was yesterday because it was just that kind of a turning point and we marched and the rocks and the bottles started flying and the guy with whom I was marching was hit by a rock or a piece of glass or something and blood started coming down his face and, of course, I'm just horrified at this point, like, "Oh, my God."

He just took his handkerchief out and put it up there and stopped it and then the catcalls were coming from the sides and I remember, you know, having, again, grown up in a Catholic, more or less Catholic family, the nuns who were marching in front of me were being called all kinds of horrible names and "When was the last time you slept with that black whatever, Sister?" you know, and so I was horrified at that. There was a guy standing by the side of the road who was my age, a little bit younger actually; he was probably 12 or 13, and he was yelling, "Semee-humans go home, semee-humans go home." And I looked at him and I caught his eye and I said, "it's not semee-humans, it's semi." He says, "oh, thanks," so, it was "Semi-humans go home, semi-humans go home."

So we marched and got into the park itself and the violence was so horrible. I don't recollect gunshots, but I know it was rocks and bottles and bricks and glass. And so what they did was they put the women and children in the middle of the circle and then the activists around that, and then the hardcore activists were the outside perimeter. It got so bad, Dr. King was moved to the middle of the circle, and so he was as close to me as just right over there. I mean, literally touching distance almost and I remember, because you were supposed to cover your head up like this and we're down on the ground and covering up and he was standing there, and looking just as calm and sanguine in the face of all this and I remember, literally it was an epiphany for me because I was frankly ready to throw something back.

I mean, that was my first reaction was "Okay, the next rock falls near me is going right back out there," but the epiphany at that moment for me was the real -- what I came to understand to be the real message and the real power of non-violence which was that by standing there and by his example of peaceful resistance, by his example of claiming the moral high ground by his response, he had the victory, and that had he stooped, he would've been on the same level as the people against whom he was fighting. And so it was in that experience that I became committed really to non-violence and to his movement, as opposed to that of some of my friends who at that time were beginning to gravitate in the direction of, you know, the Panthers and, you know, get the gun and shoot back and all the rest of it.

BOND: I'm guessing now that that's one reason you decided to become a lawyer. Is that right?

BRAUN: Yes.

BOND: What did you think that would give you?

BRAUN: A bunch of skills. I thought being a lawyer -- in fact, to answer your question, I thought being a lawyer would give me the ability to use the law which, of course, is the instrument in a large sense, of social control, right? To use that instrument in constructive and positive ways to help build community, to help people have opportunity and have a chance to have a better life. And when I first got out of law school, in fact, I turned down an offer from one of the biggest firms in Chicago to sign on to a community-based organization that I would use my legal skills, my training, rather, to work in the community. So that was my first commitment, and when that didn't work out, I became an Assistant U.S. Attorney and, of course, [what] my father called a paper-pusher for the government. He said, "Oh, you've become a paper-pusher for the government," but that was my path. I really thought that was useful.

BOND: Were there lawyers in Chicago or elsewhere in the country or the world that you said, "I want to be like that"?

BRAUN: Oh, sure. Yes, Jewel Lafontant was this model of elegance and you know, I mean, she was just the cat's pajamas as far as I was concerned and so I looked up to her. I mentioned Anna Langford and Edith Sampson, both of whom I had met. I knew– of course, everybody knew about Thurgood Marshall and the Legal Defense Team from the NAACP. I mean, everybody knew about them and so that was a real model because these were people who had used the law to transform society, and so, yes, there were a lot of role models in that regard.

BOND: What was being an Assistant D.A., what was that like?

BRAUN: Wonderful training, wonderful training. I could not have asked for better. I didn't like the criminal side, to be honest. I did some criminal prosecutions and didn't like it much. I did some appellate work. In fact, I helped write the brief on the first RICO case, Racketeering and Organized Crime. We had the first RICO case in Illinois in regards to the prosecution of the former governor of Illinois, the Kerner case, so I got a chance to work on some really high profile cases there, but I preferred the civil ones and the good thing about that was that it allowed me -- it gave me a real taste of the structure and operation of the law that I wouldn't have had otherwise and a real taste of policy issues in ways that I wouldn't have had otherwise.

I mean, Igot to third chair the lawsuit that the American Medical Association brought against Jimmy Carter's health care reforms and so as result, I read every dot and tilda, as we say, of the health care laws. Well, my views of how health care was structured that I developed at that point, helped to shape my views on health care even to this day. And so because of the grounding that I got there, I was involved with some environmental cases that helped to shape where I wound up on environmental law. And so there were a variety of housing and health care and the poverty cases, all of the cases that I got a chance to try– and, of course, you got great trial experience because you're in court everyday– helped me develop an appreciation for the issues in a way that I don't think I could've gotten any other way.

BOND: And then one of the things you do when you get there is you file a lawsuit against the Speaker?

BRAUN: Yes, well, that was a little later. That was like five years later. Yes, when the 1980 -- it wasn't that much longer, now that you mention it, because it was the '80 reapportionment so the lawsuit was filed in 1982 when they actually, you know, did it. When they went to reapportion the state legislature my own party won the -- in Illinois, we have a tradition that the parties pull a piece of paper out of Abraham Lincoln's hat, literally, I mean, so you go into Abraham Lincoln's hat and pull out this piece of paper to determine who gets the right to draw the lines if there's a tie. And that's what happened. So the Democrats drew Abraham Lincoln's hat, got the favor of the hat that time, and drew the maps, and the maps, as drawn, absolutely eliminated any Hispanic representation — even though we had two huge Hispanic communities in Chicago — and minimized to the absolute fewest number of seats possible the seats in which blacks could likely elect a representative. And it was just wrong.

And so I did what I could, you know, fighting it in the legislature through the process and we lost. We were out-voted and walking down the street again. My street kept getting me in trouble. [I'm] walking down the street and this guy with dreadlocks who was a community activist—you know the type, right? They had long hair, the coats are too big and hanging off and he's got books under his arms—and he says, "Oh, this is terrible what's happened, somebody ought to file a lawsuit." And he says, "This is a just a travesty that the lines would be drawn that way." And I said, "Well, you know, we tried." I said, "the only thing I think can happen now is that somebody files a lawsuit," and he looked at me and he said, "Well, you're a lawyer, ain't you?" Like, "Oh, well," so they sucked me in and so I wound up— as matter of fact, it was really very funny, I said, "I couldn't possibly? I don't have a law firm. I'm just by myself." "Oh, don't worry, we'll get you a battery of lawyers and we'll put it together."

Well, he showed up that evening with a guy who also had dreadlocks, was probably high on pot and talking about the U.N. Declaration of Human Rights so I knew I was in trouble. I'm thinking, "Oh, my goodness," so I wound up drawing the lawsuit up on my dining room table and I had called a friend with one of the big law firms who said that he thought his firm would handle it pro bono. This is another time when serendipity plays such a role in my life because I went -- I took my papers, because, you know, the canons of ethics say you don't file lawsuits that you can't handle, and you know, I knew there was no way that I could handle a three-judge district court, you know, huge litigation like this on my own, but I filed the case just to, you know, just to make the record. I think it got that much notice in the newspaper, if any, and then went down to this law firm to talk with the lawyers about what they would do to handle this reapportionment case and they turned me down.

BOND: Really.

BRAUN: They said, "Oh, no, we're not going to get into that, that's too much of a political hot potato," and they turned me down and I remember I was so crushed. My friend was embarrassed because he thought he had worked all this out and I was on the verge of tears because I knew that the only thing I could do was go up to the courtroom and withdraw. There was just no -- and as I was coming down out of the elevator, I was going out just as Tom Sullivan was coming in. Tom Sullivan I'd met only on one other occasion when I tendered my resignation to him as U.S. Attorney because when I left to have the baby he came on as U.S. Attorney, so he was coming on just as I was going out the door, basically, so I'd only met him once but he waved and I waved back and he said [gestures]. So, I went around, and he said, "Oh, so, what're you doing these days?" And, "Oh, well," — so I told him the reapportionment story and he said, "That sounds really interesting. Send us the papers." And Tom, at that point, was a lawyer at Jenner & Block, one of the biggest law firms in Chicago and Jeff Coleman was with him, was his partner. I guess Jeff was his understudy, his second chair, and they took the case like forty going north.

They were both Democrats obviously but they thought, yes, this is the right thing to do, and they took up the case with a commitment that Dick Newhouse, also involved with this, that Dick and I stay involved, that we don't just give them the case and get lost. And we committed to do that and I remember working harder than I probably have worked on anything in my life because we had to coordinate. We'd get community people to do the computer work. We had the first program— [the] first computer program for reapportionment was written by this black guy who was a street person basically in Chicago and he sat there and did the math and we put together, because they didn't have such things. The computers were so new, but he put together a program to run the numbers, the census numbers, so we could do the case and we would spend nights sitting in my study at my house going over papers and trying to work the numbers out.

And then Ethel, who was our kind of secret spy because she was very much a part of the Machine — she had been my roommate, Ethel Alexander, but she was very much a part of the Machine — and so in fact was called as a witness against us, but the full story was that she had sat down with me with colored pencils one night and shown me the Machine dynamics of who had done what to whom, and why these lines were here and not there, and how they managed to work it out, and so that allowed us to produce a theory about the case that allowed us not only to win, but we made real history because it was the first time that a reapportionment case had been won in the North. Remember, the Voting Rights Act provision was limited just to the Southern states. It was the first time the Voting Rights Act was extended.

Well, it happened in two stages. We first had to make a pure 14th Amendment case, which was to say that there was deliberate discrimination which the speaker of the Illinois House has never forgiven me for it, because the court had to say he deliberately intended to discriminate, but then after that decision by the three-judge court, the Congress acted to extend the Voting Rights Act nationwide so the South wasn't just singled out anymore, and then under the Voting Rights Act case, a test, really the test just got easier, but it set up really the direction that the courts have followed, well, up until fairly recently, because the courts followed for a number of years in reapportionment cases. The case was Crosby v. State Board of Elections. But the really good news, I thought from that, was not only in that case we created the first Hispanic district ever, which gave rise subsequently to an Hispanic coming to Congress, but we also created additional black districts in Illinois, but as much the point, it didn't happen again. I mean, that was the last time that the party apparatus went out of their way to try to, if you will, stick it to their minority base as a way of keeping white politicians in power.

BRAUN: But I was going to leave, again I mean, I was going to go into the private sector and that's when the first President Bush nominated Clarence Thomas to the United States Supreme Court. And, again, going back and reflecting on how important Thurgood Marshall had been, how important the Warren Court was, that my whole life would not have been possible had it not been for the whole series of cases that the Warren Court decided, everything starting with Hansberry v. Lee — you know, Lorraine Hansberry's parents' home started the housing desegregation; that was in the neighborhood near the high school that I attended, so Hansberry v. Lee — Brown v. Board, you've mentioned, Loving v. Virginia. I was in an interracial marriage, I mean, so you go — just everything along the way, you know, the Court was that kind of important in my own personal life, not just in kind of esoteric theoretical grounds. It was something that was very personal and I remember having — I wrote to my Senator, both Senator [Alan] Dixon and Senator [Paul] Simon and there was no question but Senator Simon was going to oppose the nomination.

Alan Dixon, however, was from — and by the way, both the senators were from the southern part of the state so it wasn't like it was a North-South kind of thing, even though Illinois very much has kind of that divide, if you will. It wasn't North-South because Paul was clear that he was going to resist the Thomas nomination. Alan, on the other hand, was being more coy about it and wouldn't tell people what he was going to do really, and the suspicion was he was going to support Thomas, but it wasn't — so I remember even having a conversation because he heard that there were a group of us out there just so outraged, particularly after the Anita Hill thing happened; I'd been against — in fact, I had done a television program before we knew about Anita Hill. I had done two of them opposing the Thomas nomination and saying, you know, we can do better for the Supreme Court. This is not a replacement for Thurgood Marshall, and then the Senate took a break.

There was the hiatus, as you recall, and then the Anita Hill allegations were made and when that happened, that just was just salt in the wound or fuel in the fire, and I remember having a face-to-face, one-on-one conversation with Senator Dixon and saying to him, you know, "You can't support this nomination. It will be a slap in the face to every woman, everybody, every black person, everybody who's supported you up until now. It will absolutely be contrary to our interests and send a horrible signal for young people who are Democrats that this party does not have its moral compass in good working order, that this party does not stand on the high ground when it comes to issues of civil rights." Well, he kind of, you know, he was known — I mean, the man's still alive, so I don't mean to disparage him, but he was known as "Al the Pal," right? He was always, "Hi, how're you doing?" and so he gave me, "Oh, you know, don't worry about it," dah dah dah, and then he turned around and voted for Clarence Thomas and then went away for a couple of days, or his phones were shut off for a few days, and the women just went crazy.

BOND: Let me take you back a little to something you talked about a moment ago before we talked about your tenure in the Senate. And you said in this neighborhood, the Bucket of Blood neighborhood, that it was your uplifting and your brother's undoing. Why did it do that to you? Why was this experience, living in the middle of this abject poverty, and people whose lives are really going nowhere, why did it have that uplifting effect on you?

BRAUN: Well, you know, for me, I think because I saw it as — how can I put it? — as an experience from which I was supposed to learn something. I did not for a moment, although I perhaps should have been more frightened about it than I was, I didn't for a moment think that this was a permanent condition for us. I saw it as a reality that my mother and father had split up and that she could not — and she couldn't. She couldn't rent. She tried to rent, but you can imagine a single woman with four children had a hard time renting place anywhere in — I mean, she just couldn't find a place that would rent to us. It was interesting, because later as a state legislator, that was one of the first really laws that I passed was to halt discrimination against families with children on the grounds that they discriminated against us renting. And so the law is now, you know, and I think it's national now, but at the time in Illinois, anybody with more than four units in an apartment building can't say "You can't live here," just because you've got kids in the family.

And so we wound up living with my grandmother, in my grandmother's house for that reason. And my mother was at the time determined to get back on her feet, as it were, to get a house because my father wouldn't move out of the house. You see, he wouldn't leave the house that we had on Prairie and so she couldn't live there with us. And so, I mean, it was a nasty divorce but in any event, she was determined to get back on her feet and so I saw it as a temporary condition, number one; and number two, one from which I could learn something. I just wanted to — and I did make some friends but I was off doing my thing. I was in high school. I worked. I'd gotten my first job. I was a checker, a grocery store checker, so between school and work and, you know, the other kind of extracurricular things I was involved with, I was engaged and involved.

My brother, on the other hand, found society. He found comfort. He found his niche with the boys who were his age who were gang bangers and so the gang bangers were the ones that were involved with the — and John himself was not the violent type. In fact, he was gifted, not only brilliant in that he was a very smart guy or, you know, intellectually brilliant, I thought, but also he was blessed with the kind of personality that gets along with everybody. You know, there are people who everybody likes and who gets along with everybody and nobody's ever sorry to see them come in a room. I've never been one of those people, by the way. I wish I were, but John was always that kind of easy going and so he just kind of got pulled along with this crowd of folks who were just not — who were up to no good, as they say. And he got involved with the gangs and from being involved with the gangs, he got involved with the drugs, and from being involved with the drugs, he got involved with, you know, not — dropping out of high school, he dropped out of high school and it was just downhill from there. He never went to prison. I guess that's the only good thing that came of it, but he might as well have because his brain just got so fried over time that by the time he died, you know, it was almost a blessing at that point because he'd had breakdowns and everything since that point.

BOND: So, now you get to the U.S. Senate and that's an entirely different experience. It's a unique experience in American life, and not only are you a woman. There'd been women before, but you're the first black woman and I read some place where you thought people couldn't talk about this, couldn't mention this because they're so unused to discussing race. What did your colleagues say about race, about you, or did they just act like you weren't black?

BRAUN: Oh, no, no, no, I mean, if anything, race was the 800-pound gorilla in the room always. When I was sworn in, some civil rights leaders, who will remain nameless, who had nothing to do with my election, came, showed up and, you know, taking credit for my election.

BOND: I know their names.

BRAUN: And we were all sitting on a stage and people were giving — and Strom Thurmond showed up and one of my girlfriends in fact started to boo and, of course, the crowd of people who came were just entirely too civilized to let that happen. They shut her up, shushed her, and everybody was standing there literally in shocked disbelief because Strom at this point as you can imagine was 9,000 years old and barely — I mean, if he knew he was in the Senate I would be surprised— but he made a point to come to say a few words at the podium at my swearing in and I laughed about it afterwards because it was so funny. It was part of him, you know, this is the new face of Strom Thurmond that he was showing at the time. So race was the 800-pound gorilla in all of it and did play a role and, frankly, I didn't realize until — you know, you learn from experience, but there was some aspects of my tenure that were absolutely tinged and colored by race. Aspects is the wrong word. It's expectations. There were expectations having to do with race that I didn't fully appreciate until, you know, obviously after the fact.

BOND: In all of these things, in that fight, when you served as ambassador, which is entirely different from being a senator or legislator, and when you're in the legislature and even before that, Recorder of Deeds, whatever it is, is there some kind of vision you have that you bring to your work? You talked before about doing the best where you're planted, but is there a vision that covers everything that you've done or does it change over time? Do you have a different vision now, say, than you did when you were a young state legislator?

BRAUN: Well, it hasn't exactly changed in the really broad outlines. It's changed obviously in the specifics and in the details, but in the most sweeping generalization I can make, it's like that old gospel — I don't know if it's gospel or blues to be honest, but that old song about "You've got to serve somebody." You know, it might be the devil and it might be the Lord, but you've got to serve somebody and that really has been my — for me, I have found my life path as one of a challenge of being able to serve the higher values, to serve in ways that give my life meaning, as have been weighed in the forces for good. And you know, I used to tell my son that Dr. King had an expression about [how] the arc of the moral universe is long but it bends towards justice, and I used to tell my son but that depends on people making it bend towards justice and if we don't weigh in, each of us in our way, in whatever endeavor it is that we undertake to bend it towards justice, to make it go in the direction of truth, to lead it in the direction of the higher values, then it won't. It's just that simple and so everybody has to choose, has to chose how you want to come out. And you can either see your ego as being wrapped up in, you know, wearing 30-karat diamond rings or in trying to make in difference in the world in which you are fortunate enough to live.

BOND: I've seen over and over again, in things we've collected about your writing, talking about the necessity to seek consensus, to make a consensus. That's an important part of your leadership style?

BRAUN: Well, it has to be, because without consensus, without having people agree on moving in a direction together, everybody's frustrated and/or wasting their time. You have to talk to people in ways they can hear. I mean, a lot of times, you know, people want the same things in life. I mean, everybody really at the end of the day wants the same things. How they see their interests is where the divisions start to come in, and if you are a legislator and you want to get somebody to your point of view, then what you want to do is go and talk to them about your vision in words they can understand and hear.

I'll tell you a quick story and this is from my state legislative days. This is actually another one of my favorite stories and I'm getting a chance to put my stories on tape with you… When I was in the state legislature, the poor people in Illinois had not received a cost-of-living increase in over ten years. The guy I succeeded who had stepped down had been trying to get a cost-of-living increase for welfare recipients for ten years and had always failed. And with inflation, we'd gone through the years of almost 20 percent inflation, it was really hard times for the poorest of the poor in Illinois, so I got down there and filed a bill calling for a cost-of-living increase. Nobody had bothered to tell me that the way you pass legislation— because I was that kind of new— was that you went to the leadership, and the leadership told you what they were going to pass and let you carry a bill for them. Or you went and said "I've got this idea," and they said yes or no.

I just thought I had to go and convince my colleagues to vote for it.

Well, there were 177 people in the Illinois House under the old system. I actually made up — pulling back on my U.S. attorney training, I had folders for every legislator that said how many poor people there were in their district, how many aged, blind and disabled, how many dah dah dah, you know, and what the situation was in their district. And I went around and talked to 159 of them. I wish I still had the little check sheet, because I'd go and I'd talk to somebody and check them off, and one of the people I talked to was a guy named Webber Borchers, and Webber Borchers was one of these real rightwing nut cases, frankly. He was a John Bircher who had actually spent time in jail for having tapped some of the phones of some of the leftist activists on the University of Illinois campus. I mean, he was that kind of out there, but I didn't know this because I had done the homework on the district, but I had not done as much homework as I should have on the individual legislators. So I went and I sat down with Representative Borchers and I tried to talk to him about why he was a Republican, why he should support this because of the poor people in his district.

He says, "I can't vote for that because the people in my district are buying lobsters with food stamps and driving Cadillac cars on welfare," and he'd just go the whole — and I said, "But, no, Mr. Representative Borchers, look at this, you've got these many blind people in your district, you've got these many children," and I made the whole argument and he'd, "No, no." So I went on and —

Well, when the bill came up, when the bills were tallied, lo and behold, on the board, I had won and, of course, it was shock waves. It had made the news. I mean, it was like a big deal, "Like, oh, my goodness, we've passed? Now this is going to be on the governor's desk. What's the governor going to do?" It's passed the House where it had never passed, so this is great news. And one of my colleagues, a Republican, Susan Catania who helped worked the Republican side, she came over and we were celebrating in the aisles we were so happy, and Webber Borchers who was kind of crippled came over on his cane and he said, "Ms. Braun, I didn't vote for your bill. I just couldn't see my way clear to help them welfare cheats in my district take any more taxpayers' money. But I almost did, because you're the second-nicest colored lady I have ever met. Now, the first nicest has been working for us for 35 years, but you're the second-nicest colored lady." And, of course, Susan turned green, like, "Oh, my God," but I tell this story to say that even for Webber Borchers there was a point of reference and a set of interests that made sense to him. Now, his other prejudices may have overcome that, but my job as I saw it, was to make the case to him, and to make the case to enough others to win the legislature back.

BOND: Let me tell you a quick story. When I was in the Georgia House we had a bill to vote an appropriation for autistic children and I asked the guy sitting next to me who was an old veteran guy, I said, "What about this?" He said, "Well, you probably should vote for it." So the vote came up; I voted for it. He voted against it. I said, "Why'd you vote against it?" He said, "Bond, we have too many artistic children in Georgia now."

BOND: How does race consciousness affect your race? You talked about someone, your father, I think, was a race man. Do you see yourself as someone who advances issues of race, or issues of society, or both, and is there a distinction between them? And is there such a thing as someone who transcends race?

BRAUN: I think that we all have to get to the point of transcending race. The real issue in my mind is the liberation of the human spirit, in whatever package it comes in, whether it's a black package or a female package or an Asian package or Hispanic package, a poor package, a disabled package, a gay package, a straight package. The packaging is less important than what it is that individual has to contribute and tapping the genius of that is really what this whole — this experience, this republic is supposed to be about. That's what makes us different. That's where the beacon of light comes from, the notion that every individual is a reflection of God and that the goal of society is to let those reflections have full play in the society as a whole.

And so for me, maybe again, my life, I'm born into a body: I'm a black woman, I'm real clear about that. I also know that while race is localized, how race is perceived is a local issue, really, in the scheme of things. Gender is universal. Gender is more universal as an issue than race is, but both of those things really speak to the willingness of a society to open itself up to the contributions that people who might be female have to make, that people who might be black have to make and celebrating, celebrating what that is.

I don't want to have to be black and not act that way. I don't want to have to submerge my cultural background. I don't want to have to put 43rd & Berkeley in a closet to be accepted by somebody. I want to be able to say, "Hey, look, this is the sum total of my experiences, and I'm going to put that on the table because you know what, with these experiences, you will be able to make a better set of decisions." You know, I want to put the sum total of being a girl, you know, wearing pinkish purple, not ashamed to talk about my diet, I mean, put that as much as part of me as the intellectual side or as the side that can read a balance sheet. I mean, I want to be able to bring all of that to bear on the contribution I have to make, whether it is in the public sector or as a private citizen.

BOND: Talk about differences. Do you think you have a different leadership style when you're dealing with groups that are all black or mixed race or predominantly white? Are you different in these?

BRAUN: No. And that for me is— it's like the old, "Oh, what a tangled web we weave, etc." For me it's just a lot easier to be the same and so whether I'm talking to a group of church ladies on the southside of Chicago or farmers in Iowa, I will use the same language. Now, I may talk about different issues. The church ladies may not be concerned about soy bean loan rates and genetically modified corn. They may not care about that. I'll speak to their issues, but in terms of the words I use and how I comport myself and my demeanor, it's always, you know, I am what I am.

BOND: Isn't there likely to be the occasion where you say something and the church ladies say, "Amen, that's right," and you say something, and the farmers don't say anything, even though they agree with what you're saying.

BRAUN: Oh, yeah.

BOND: Does that create in you a different response?

BRAUN: You know, I'll tell you something, that is actually — that actually touches on what I see as one of my own weaknesses which is, I have and am working on having a better sense of how others see me because, again, because I say the same thing to the church ladies as the farmers, I have to, you know — my antenna has to be a little better in terms of what it is that they hear when they hear the words. Let me give you an example.

This gets back to the Senate days and back to welfare again. Pat Moynihan was also a friend and mentor for me. He was very nice to me when I was in the Senate and he was very opposed to Clinton's welfare reform for a variety of reasons, not the least of which was, as he put it, it was destroying the social safety net that the country had had since the 1930s and I also was vehemently opposed to the President's welfare reform and because it was just wrong in my opinion. I still say it's wrong. I told him I thought it was it was wrong, so that's not, you know — but what I came to — and I did everything. I mean, I had historical vignettes of what the country was like when the states ran welfare, the orphan trains out of New York and all the rest. I mean, I did every aspect of the argument I was able to put together.

It wasn't until midway through the debate that it occurred to me that I may as well have been talking into the toilet as the Senate chamber on this issue because what my colleagues heard was a black woman standing up saying "Where's mine?" you know, whatever the words coming out, what was being perceived was here's this black female, the prototypical welfare mother standing up here saying, "Why're you taking away my benefits?" as opposed to here's a senator arguing in behalf of poor children throughout the United States and what kind of nation we are, how we define ourselves as a country, as a community, around the issue of poverty. And so it hurt me. It really — I mean, on a real fundamental level, that realization hurt greatly because I realized then that no matter what I said, if I had been white and male making the same arguments, it would've resonated differently. If I'd been white and female making the same arguments it would've resonated differently.

BOND: Is it then that you think it may be impossible for you to get away from race?

BRAUN: Oh, you can never get away.

BOND: Because of how you look, and how I see you, others see you, that race is always at the forefront of perception and that perception in turn colors what you say and what I hear?

BRAUN: Exactly. Race is, again, it's the 800-pound gorilla in the room. It defines the context of the conversation and that's just a reality. And as we change the reality— and that reality has been changing. I mean, the great victory in my mind of the civil rights movement was not just integration. The great victory of it was that it made racism unpopular, public racism. Now, there're people who privately will say what they say and still tell the racist jokes and everything, but the larger society frowns on that conduct now. That's very different than, you know, a hundred years ago. That's very different than what was going on at the turn of the last century. And that great victory, of course, then allows us to get to the next level, whatever that will be. And so I think it is probably a continuum of moving, and progress is linear, but the fact is we're in a different place on race now than we were in this country 50 years ago when Brown v. Board of Education was decided, but we're not where we can get to.