For the People: Indiana Congresswoman Julia Carson

The procession began early the morning of Friday, December 21, 2007. As people gathered in the streets to say goodbye, holding their hands over their hearts with tears in their eyes, a horse-drawn military caisson left 2530 North Park Avenue on the near north side of Indianapolis for the approximately three-mile trip to the Indiana Statehouse. Drummers and an honor guard with rifles and a U.S. and Indiana flag led the way while about fifty friends and family members marched behind the caisson.

Once the flag-draped casket arrived at the capitol, uniformed members of the Indiana National Guard carried the body to formally lie in state in the Statehouse’s rotunda to be met by a large crowd gathered to pay their respects. Only a few dignitaries—Abraham Lincoln, James Whitcomb Riley, and Benjamin Harrison for example—had received such a distinction in the nineteenth state’s history. All of those so honored had one thing in common—they were male. The newest member of this select company, someone Governor Mitch Daniels called “the people’s best friend,” however, was different from those who had come before; she was a woman, Julia Carson.

The Statehouse ceremony honoring Carson, a politician who never lost an election in her long career, included an impressive array of notables from the world of Hoosier politics, including her grandson, Andre Carson, then an Indianapolis City Council member, who called his grandmother “the people’s champ.”  Those who lined up to say farewell to a woman they simply knew as “Julia” also remembered someone whom they could always count on for assistance in times of trouble. Bonnie Spalding, a seventy-three-year-old dressed in an “I Love Julia” t-shirt, recalled a woman who never forgot that “there were people who really needed her help. She was prepared to do it all the time, no matter what.” Others also touted Carson’s ability to remain connected to her past as she rose from impoverished beginnings to a career in the halls of Congress in Washington, D.C. Vanessa Summers, a Carson friend and Indiana legislator, said the congresswoman might have objected to all the fuss. “I’ll bet she’s looking down saying, ‘I told them not to do all this, but boy, it looks good,’” said Summers.

Carson, who had died from lung cancer at the age of sixty-nine on December 15, had been used to breaking barriers throughout her life. The only child of an unwed mother, Velma Porter, who had spent her life doing backbreaking work cleaning the homes, cooking the meals, and caring for children of wealthy families on Indianapolis’s north side, Carson had grown up to become only the third African American woman to serve in the Indiana House of Representatives and the first black woman, along with Katie Hall of Gary, to be elected to the Indiana Senate.

After eighteen years of service with the Democratic Party in the state legislature, Carson left her secure seat to run and win election in 1990 as Center Township trustee in charge of poor relief in the heart of Marion County. Faced with an office $20 million in debt, Carson instituted anti-fraud procedures and a workfare program whereby able-bodied relief recipients were required to perform community service in return for assistance. “I am more sympathetic for a little old lady whose Social Security didn’t come in, and she can’t pay her heating bill,” Carson told a reporter, “than I am for people who are determined to live off the system.” These efforts helped move the office into the twenty-first century and resulted in a $6 million surplus and won for Carson her second honor as “Woman of the Year” from the Indianapolis Star.

In 1996, at the urging of her mentor, longtime Indianapolis congressman Andrew Jacobs Jr., Carson ran for national office herself, becoming only the second African American woman from Indiana to serve in Congress, and the first woman and the first African American to represent Indianapolis in Washington, D.C. As a fiercely liberal representative for Indiana’s Seventh Congressional District, a district with a slight Democratic edge and a decided majority of white voters, she fought off numerous challenges over the years from a variety of Republican opponents. Carson won six terms in office with the help of a dedicated group of supporters who wielded red and white campaign signs emblazoned with the slogan that came to symbolize their adoration for their candidate: “I ♥ Julia.” She proved time and time again, noted one Hoosier political expert, that she could “bring people to the polls who ordinarily may not participate in the political process.”

Upon Carson’s death there were some prominent local officeholders who credited their careers to the assistance and encouragement they received from her (including longtime legislator William Crawford and former Indianapolis mayor Bart Peterson). A proven vote getter in Center Township, Carson aided the Democratic Party by attracting inner-city Marion County residents to the polls, aiding the winning efforts of gubernatorial candidate Frank O’Bannon in 1996 and Peterson’s mayoral contest in 1999. Before her own tries for public office, however, Carson had maintained a healthy skepticism for politics and politicians. In her mind, those involved in the system were often dishonest and could not be trusted to do what was right for people in need. “I felt that people in office would make themselves appear to be superhuman during election time,” she noted. “But after they got elected they’d forget about everyone else and try to get what they could for themselves.”

Carson’s attitudes about politicians were altered by her work as a legislative assistant to Jacobs, who in 1965 hired the divorced mother of two children away from her job as a secretary with the United Auto Workers Local 550. “We just had a lot of rapport,” Jacobs remembered. “I liked what she had to say, particularly the way she said it. And I said, ‘Boy, there’s an awful lot of brains in that large head.’” Carson found Jacobs to be “a rare kind of politician,” as he displayed a real interest in his constituents. “And I thought that perhaps those qualities could be transferred to someone like me,” Carson said. She never saw herself as being in the mold of a prototypical politician, with “fathers who were professors and mothers who were teachers.” Still, she believed she could be a role model for those who wanted a better life for themselves—one of the reasons she chose to remain living in a neighborhood nicknamed Dodge City for its violence so that children would have “someone strong to identify with.”

In her attempts for state and national office, Carson engaged in a down-to-earth style of campaigning. She became known for wearing big hats and her unpretentious speaking style, calling people “baby” and older women “mom.” Until her death, Carson lived in the same house and neighborhood she had lived in before her rise to political prominence and refused to obtain an unlisted telephone number. Her ability to connect with average citizens impressed political pundits. “She’d walk up to somebody—I’ve seen this at the polls—and even if she didn’t know them, she appeared to, and they responded as if they knew her. And this was not just political savvy; it was, for want of a better term, ‘street smarts,’” noted Brian Vargas, a former pollster and frequent commentator on politics in central Indiana.

Carson also made sure that her congressional office paid attention to what was occurring in her district, including sending letters of condolence to families whose loved ones had died and paying visits to those who were sick and in the hospital. While in Congress, Carson fought for legislation to expand a program to offer children health insurance, sponsored a measure to ensure veterans who completed prison terms would still have the right to vote, and supported a bill to help individuals and families in danger of becoming homeless. Perhaps her crowning achievement came in 1999 when she convinced Congress to pass legislation honoring Rosa Parks, the African American woman who had refused to give up her seat on a segregated city bus in Montgomery, Alabama, with a Congressional Gold Medal. Carson also opposed the war in Iraq, indicating the 2003 invasion was to protect U.S. oil interests in the region. “Julia was for those with no voice,” said Dan Parker, Indiana Democratic Party chairman. “She fought for those who had lost hope in the system. She fought for and never lost sight of what she believed in.”

Carson’s crusade for the disadvantaged was fueled in part by her own humble beginnings growing up in the Haughville section of Indianapolis, where she lived in an African American neighborhood of mostly poor families. For a role model, Carson could look to her mother, someone who worked hard all her life to give her daughter the opportunities she never had. “She taught me about hard work, spirituality, and trust,” Carson said, adding that her mother also educated her through both word and deed that “great pride can come from work well done, even if it was no well-compensated.” 

Despite the underprivileged surroundings, there existed a strong sense of community in Haughville. Because her mother often had to be away from home when she was working, Carson had to rely on her neighbors to help take care of her. If she found herself at a friend’s home at mealtime, or if one of her friends happened to be at her house when the dinner hour arrived, another plate was set on the table with no questions asked. “Every woman on the block or in the rooming houses where we sometimes lived was my ‘auntie’ and every man was my ‘uncle,’” Carson recalled. “Our neighbors were truly like family.” This lesson from her younger days followed her throughout her political career, as Carson held the view that “loving all our neighbors is not just a personal obligation, it is an obligation that should be the guiding force behind the work of all elected officials and of the government itself.”

In addition to battling her impoverished upbringing, Carson had to contend with the endemic racism of the time. As African Americans flocked to large northern cities following World War I, they hoped to leave behind the Jim Crow-restricted life in the South for better living and working conditions in the North. They were often met, however, with low paying, menial jobs and substandard housing in segregated neighborhoods. That was the case for Carson and her mother when they moved from Louisville to Indianapolis in 1939. Although Carson grew up in a city that by 1930 had a population that was 12 percent African American, she and others of her race could not sit down and eat with white customers in local restaurants, register as guests in downtown hotels, or swim in public pools. If she had the money to see a movie, Carson would have had to sit in a segregated seating area in the theater’s balcony. If she wanted the thrill of a ride on a rollercoaster, she would not be admitted to the city’s entertainment showcase, Riverside Amusement Park, which was restricted to “whites only patronage.” The unfairness of segregation was also magnified during trips she made to visit her grandmother in Tennessee. Although Carson could sit wherever she wanted to when she boarded the train left Indianapolis, she and other African American passengers had to retreat to a segregated car when the train crossed the Kentucky border. And when the train stopped, Carson could not use the clean restrooms reserved for white patrons at stations, but had to relieve herself in rank outhouses.

Carson also received her education in a segregated school system where educational officials “jealously protected” the separation of white and black students. Instead of assigning black students to neighborhood white schools when her elementary school burned down, school officials sent buses each morning to haul Carson and her classmates “to an abandoned and condemned school building where makeshift classrooms were arranged,” she recalled. Carson also attended a segregated high school, Crispus Attucks. Indianapolis Public School leaders had established Crispus Attucks in 1927 to keep black students from mixing with their white counterparts, but they unintentionally created—despite hand-me-down equipment—a beneficial environment for learning. Carson noted that as a student she received instruction from “the best and brightest African American teachers who were not allowed to teach in white schools. At Attucks, we had more teachers with doctorate degrees than the rest of the city’s high schools combined.”

Although Carson endured both racism and sexism growing up, including watching her beloved mother suffer abuse from a man she married while they lived in Indianapolis, she could always count on the support of her teachers and neighbors to support her and encourage her to believe that she could “do anything I set my mind to.” Not everyone, however, was so kind. Perhaps her greatest battle came from overcoming the shame of being an illegitimate child. “Labels like this encourage generalization,” Carson noted, “such as the notion that a child born out of wedlock is not likely to amount to anything. Labels carry a stigma that can convince people that they indeed will not be able to succeed.” Her experiences with the labels attached to her because of her birth status, race, and gender made Carson “acutely aware of the injustice of labeling and discrimination of any kind.”

The lessons Carson learned in life followed her throughout her subsequent political career—a career she undertook with reluctance. Although she received some early political training working for Jacobs, Carson did not jump at the opportunity to seek public office. Instead, Jacobs, who faced a tough 1972 re-election campaign in a gerrymandered district that favored his Republican opponent and friend William Hudnut  (Jacobs came back two years later to defeat Hudnut), had to work hard to talk Carson into seeking for a seat in the Indiana House to represent District 45, which included all of Marion County’s Center Township. “She thought it would be disloyal to our friendship because it would take her away from my campaign, which was a campaign of futility that year,” said Jacobs, who remembered sitting with Carson for over an hour at her home convincing her to run. Carson recalled Jacobs finally told her: “Come on, kid. This is the time to step up.” 

Carson’s unwillingness to enter politics came in part from a fear of public speaking fueled by a stutter she had developed during her elementary school years and from which she overcame through the help of her school’s principal. She also had to endure often ill health from high blood pressure, asthma, diabetes, and other ailments, as well the failure of an Indianapolis dress shop she owned that caused her great financial hardships for many years.

Once she entered the political arena, Carson discovered that voters viewed her as someone who would always represent their interests to the best of her abilities. In her first run for the state legislature, Carson was the leading vote getter in a Democratic primary field that included eleven candidates, as well as leading a Democratic sweep of the three open seats in the general election. As she explained to a local reporter when asked why she was running for office, Carson believed her years working with Jacobs gave her insight into people’s problems and how to assist them. “I’m not saying I could change things,” she noted, “but I could be someone who is interested in helping people.” 

After two successful terms as a state representative, Carson took on and defeated an incumbent Democratic state senator, Marie T. Lauck, and went on to smash her Republican challenger by approximately sixteen thousand votes to become one of the first two black women elected to such a position. Despite these achievements, Carson faced some of the same prejudices she had endured as a child, even being mistaken for a maid by the doorkeeper of the Indiana House when she first tried to enter the chamber to represent her district.

Carson defied the odds again in 1996 when she won the Tenth Congressional District seat vacated by the retiring Jacobs. Although Carson could count on Jacobs support in the primary, she faced some tough opponents in a nine-candidate field, including Ann DeLaney, former chairwoman of the Indiana Democratic Party. DeLaney had the edge when it came to raising money, but Carson did what she would continue to do in subsequent races—win on the ground by getting her voters energized and out to the voting booth. “We didn’t have the money to buy a lot of publicity, and so we did it with lots of grass-roots people,” Carson explained at the time, “and that’s what made the difference.” In the fall, she defeated her Republican opponent, fellow former Indiana legislator Virginia Blankenbaker for the first of her six consecutive terms in Congress. The race was not without incident. During an appearance with Blankenbaker before the Indianapolis Bar Association, the candidates took questions from audience members who had written their queries on index cards. One of the questions Carson received asked: “Do you give bottles of whiskey to your voters?” Ignoring the ethnic slur, Carson went to the microphone and quietly responded, “No.” Later, she admitted to Jacobs that she had “never felt so alone.”

Although at first hesitant to enter the political fray, Carson became a master at seizing the spotlight from her opponents during sometimes bitter and contentious campaigns. In 2002 seeking a fourth term in Congress, she faced a tough fight from her GOP challenger Brose McVey, a former aide to Hoosier political heavyweights Dan Quayle and Dan Coats. The district had changed since Carson’s first election, as the 2000 census had eliminated one of Indiana’s ten congressional districts, causing the remaining districts to expand to include new territory and new voters. Renumbered as the Seventh Congressional District, the area represented by Carson had more than a hundred thousand new constituents, many of whom had been used to having a conservative Republican, Dan Burton, as their congressman. Sensing a potential upset, the Republican National Committee targeted the race, offering money and other support to McVey. The GOP candidate had also won the backing of an area media giant, the Indianapolis Star. The newspaper’s editorial board endorsed McVey’s candidacy and a poll taken shortly before the election showed Carson with only a slim lead of one percentage point.

Carson turned the tables on her opponent during a debate at a Kiwanis Club on Indianapolis’s north side. She refused to be on the same stage with McVey, accusing him of waging the most negative campaign she had ever seen in her years of politics, and storming out of a planned debate. “If I seem rather upset,” Carson told the stunned crowd, “you are looking at someone who is extremely hurt by this campaign. I don’t think I have every in my life seen the political decay, the lowest common denominator that has been applied by my Republican opponent in this particular race. I don’t feel comfortable being in the same room with him.” Although McVey termed Carson’s action as a “staged act of righteous indignation not warranted by reality,” the move roused the congresswoman’s supporters into action. Carson also took advantage of a glitch with a voting machine on election day that failed to register her vote, raising a fuss that was caught on camera by local broadcasters. “She played that like a drum,” recalled pollster Vargas. “‘They’re keeping Julia from voting!’ It was on all the news stations, first thing in the morning. And this may have galvanized her troops.” Carson captured the election with approximately 53 percent of the vote.

Facing another tight race in 2006 from Indianapolis businessman and former marine Eric Dickerson, an African American, Carson, during a meeting with the Indianapolis Star’s editorial board, disclosed information about Dickerson’s arrest in 1991 on charges of domestic abuse involving his wife and daughter. Carson, who interceded on her mother’s behalf as a child when she experienced beatings from a spouse, noted that Dickerson had “been running as Mr. Righteous, Mr. Righteous, when in fact, he beat his wife up to a pulp.” Dickerson angrily disputed the charge, noting that the case had been dismissed and his wife and daughter had declined to testify and accused Carson of conducting a dirty campaign. The Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee subsequently paid for and distributed fliers in the district attacking Dickerson for the alleged abuse and accusing him of lying about the issue. Carson expressed anger with the DCCC about the fliers and said she had nothing to do with their distribution. On election day, Carson had prevailed again, winning by approximately ten thousand votes.

In seeking support in every nook and cranny in her district for the causes and candidates she believed in, Carson brought her own unique style to political campaigns. One local reporter noted that the congresswoman was “part mother hen, part circus ringmaster, part best girlfriend, and part master political operative.” To see how Carson worked her magic on voters, the Indianapolis Star sent one of its reporters, R. Joseph Gelarden, to follow the congresswoman as she stumped on behalf of Democratic mayoral candidate Peterson on November 2, 1999. That morning, Carson, wearing a floppy hat, sat at her kitchen table in her home equipped with three cell phones and a landline instrument arranging transportation for voters who needed rides to their polling places. “You got to maximize your neighbors,” Carson told Gelarden. “Know them. Talk to them. A lot of them don’t know how to vote. They are intimidated by the process. But they don’t want you to know they are afraid. So you got to talk to them. Energize them to vote and tell them not to be intimidated.” It also helped, she added, to “know everyone’s phone number.”

After completing her phone calls, Carson left her home and visited a polling place at a local school, glad-handing poll workers before moving on to meet with Peterson and his family at a community center at Thirtieth and Clifton streets, where she introduced the mayoral hopeful to voters by saying, “This is my friend Bart Peterson. Vote for him, won’t you?” When she learned via a call on one of her cell phones that turnout was light in two heavily Democratic wards, she turned to local Democratic officials who were with her to coordinate dispatching sound trucks to encourage people to get out and vote. Carson even called her lawyer, Lacy Johnson, to arrange a meeting back at her home. “I’ll be there at 1,” she told Johnson. “I want those trucks on the road by 1:15. We can do that, darlin’, can’t we?”Carson finished off the afternoon by returning home to a table in her front hall loaded down by pans filled with food to take to poll workers at her home ward. With that task accomplished and the polls beginning to be crowded with people going to the polls after their work day had been completed, the satisfied Carson simply said: “Let’s go home.”

Carson’s final years in politics were filled with uncertainty. Bouts of illness caused her to miss several votes in Congress, a situation that caused fueled speculation with the media and political insiders that she might not run again. In August 2007, after her grandson, Andre, had announced that he intended to run for a seat on the Indianapolis City-County Council, Carson indicated she would run for a seventh term office. “I like this kind of stuff, and I like to go out and talk to people about it,” she told reporters. Carson’s decision was met with approval by Indiana Democrats. That fall, however, Carson, who had been using a wheelchair to get around in Congress and had missed 13 percent of the 923 votes held since January, requested and received a leave of absence from her work due to a leg infection near a spot where a vein had been removed for double bypass heart surgery in 1996.

On Saturday, November 24, 2007, Carson stunned her supporters by revealing she had terminal lung cancer. In a statement released to the media, she noted: “In the late summer of 2007, Congress granted me a leave of absence because of my leg infection. My wonderful doctor cured the leg, and I went into rehabilitation, planning to be back in Washington shortly. Then the second shoe fell—heavily. My doctor discovered lung cancer. It had gone into remission years before, but it was back with a terminal vengeance. Therefore, I take this occasion to express my loving and literally eternal gratitude to my friends, including family, constituents and colleagues, who have given me so much love, support and trust. God bless our beloved country.”

Just three weeks after her shocking announcement, Carson died on Saturday, December 15, 2007, at her Indianapolis home on North Park Avenue with her family at her side. As she had in life, Carson touched the lives of a diverse group of people. At her funeral at the Eastern Star Church, approximately two thousand gathered to pay their respects, including such disparate figures as longtime Republican U.S. Senator Richard G. Lugar and leader of the Nation of Islam Louis Farrakhan. Speaker after speaker praised Carson for her kindness, her ability to remain connected to her constituents, and lifelong commitment to social justice.

Jacobs, who considered Carson to be his “little sister,” noted after her death that when pundits mentioned “Congresswoman Carson’s people,” they were referring to poor black residents of the Seventh Congressional District. “Rubbish,” Jacobs said. Carson’s people included everyone in her district, “regardless of physical or economic description.” After all, he added, the rich can be “treated unjustly by the federal government just as middle- and low-income citizens can. And wherever there was injustice, this Lincoln-like lady was there to redress it.” Carson’s political philosophy, Jacobs said, could be culled from the Sermon on the Mount: “Blessed are they who thirst for justice.”