Guest Columnist
It was seven years ago this month that she walked into my office, closed the door behind her, and then, with a humble sort of assertiveness, declared, “I’m not coming to work tomorrow; I’m taking off for the shutdown. And it doesn’t matter whether I get paid.”
She was then my top legal assistant, college-educated, and so committed to the cause of economic inclusion that she was willing to put her job on the line to participate in a civil rights demonstration that turned out to be the largest and most impactful in the city in over three decades: the 1999 I-70 Shutdown.
Today, she represents the people as Missouri state representative for the 57th District, a position she’s held for four years. Come this August 8, she hopes to begin serving them as the next Missouri senator for the 4th District. For on that day the people will decide whether Yaphett El-Amin is the person to shoulder the notable legacy of African Americans who have held this important office, beginning in 1960 with Theodore D. McNeal and including such distinguished leaders as Gwen Giles, John Bass and Lacey Clay.
If elected, she would not be the first black woman to hold a Missouri Senate seat who stood in civil disobedient defiance that hot summer day in July. Casting aside all political risks and niceties, state Senator Paula Carter, who departed us too soon, marched courageously that early morning out onto Interstate 70. When one of the leaders of the protest, Tiahmo Rauf, gave the marchers the signal to “sit down,” she knelt proudly on the highway pavement, while other politicians with less heart scattered the moment the police barked out from their megaphones that they were going to begin handcuffing those of us blocking the morning rush hour traffic that jammed cars from Goodfellow back to I-170.
I happened to be holding Paula’s hand as we, along with hundreds of others, locked arm-in-arm in unity, marched intrepidly down the ramp and onto the oncoming speeding traffic. She told me that she had put aside her reservations about taking the inclusion issue to the streets rather than into the political arena, where she had grown comfortable with her mastery of Missouri politics.
“Eric,” she said in the calmly fierce tone for which she was known, “this is a time for political action, not politics.”
In the weeks and months following the protest, which were consumed with meetings and negotiations with state and federal officials to hammer out the implementation of the agreement signed to end the protest, Paula was ever-present and assertive to ensure the community was not left with empty promises. She deftly employed her diplomatic skills and political acumen to compel the resistant state bureaucracy and well-intended governor to honor their covenant to create a construction training school and to raise the state’s minority goals to the third-highest in the nation.
As I sat on the highway that morning and looked around at the pride and serenity on the faces of the other politicians who also dared to be arrested – state Rep. Charles Quincy Troupe, the late state Senator J.B. “Jet “ Banks, and Ald. Freeman Bosley Sr. – I did not envision that Yaphett, sitting just behind them on the pavement, would one day enter elective politics.
I should have known better. I should have known that the deep compassion she held for the people would not and could not be contained. I should have foreseen that July morning that the woman whose every conversation and regal demeanor embodied and reflected “black pride” would one day carry her principles and community concerns into the halls of politics.
I should have foreseen then what I was gratified to witness more recently when activist Jamilah Nasheed – now a candidate for office herself – and I were being escorted into a paddy wagon for protesting and blocking the tracks of the MetroLink: a Missouri legislator on the scene, impassionedly and intelligently articulating her committed support for economic inclusion – state Rep. and state Senate candidate Yaphett El-Amin.