Rep. Yvette Clarke (D)

The congresswoman from the 11th District is Yvette Clarke, a Democrat elected in 2006. She was born in Brooklyn to immigrant parents from Jamaica. As a young girl, she tagged along to political meetings and events with her mother, Una Clarke, who in 1991 became the first Jamaican elected to the New York City Council. Yvette Clarke attended Oberlin College in Ohio, but fell short of graduating by six credit hours. She returned to New York, helped train child-care workers, worked as a state legislative aide and served as business-development director for the Bronx Overall Economic Development Corp. In 2001, when term limits forced her mother off the City Council, Clarke defeated four other candidates to succeed her in the predominately Caribbean area of Flatbush and East Flatbush.

Since its creation in 1968 until 2006, the 11th District had been represented by just two people, both Democrats—trailblazer Shirley Chisholm, the first black woman elected to Congress and a 1972 presidential candidate, and Major Owens, who succeeded her in 1982. Owens had announced in 2004 that he would serve just one more term and hoped that his son Chris, a health-industry administrator, would succeed him. But Clarke was also part of a political family that had designs on the seat. Her mother had run against Owens, an African-American, in the 2000 Democratic primary, a bitter contest that exposed divisions between the local Caribbean-American community and the African-American community. Una Clark accused Owens of being ineffective and anti-immigrant. Owens accused Clarke of betraying their friendship, and he won 54%-46%. Four years later, Yvette Clarke and fellow City Councilwoman Tracy Boyland challenged Owens in the Democratic primary, both aware that his son would likely run for the seat two years later. Owens won the low-turnout primary with an unimpressive 45%, to 29% for Clarke and 22% for Boyland. When Clarke faced re-election to the council in 2005, Owens retaliated by backing, unsuccessfully, her primary-election opponent.

Clarke decided to run again in 2006, but first had to navigate a competitive primary field. New York City Councilman David Yassky, who is white, jumped in, only to be called a “colonizer” by Owens for running in a majority-black district that had been created in 1968 in response to a Voting Rights Act lawsuit. The black community feared that the well-financed Yassky, who had moved three blocks into the district to run for the seat, would be the beneficiary if the black vote was splintered among the three prominent black candidates: Clarke, Chris Owens and state Sen. Carl Andrews. By the end of August, Yassky had raised over $1.3 million, more than the other three candidates combined.

But Yassky had an awkward campaign style that made it difficult for him to connect with voters. Clarke’s status as the only woman in the contest and her support among Caribbean-Americans were helpful. On the leading local issue, Clarke supported a plan to build a Nets arena and other development in Brooklyn, while Owens vigorously opposed it. Clarke stumbled when she was forced to backtrack from her claim that she had graduated from Oberlin. But she picked up the endorsement of the Service Employees International Union’s powerful Local 1199, which worked to turn out votes. In the September 12 primary, the only election that mattered in this heavily Democratic district, Clarke defeated Yassky 31%-27%, while Andrews finished third with 23% and Owens last with 19%.

In the House, Clarke has had a solidly liberal voting record. In her activist freshman class, she operated largely in the background and waited nine months to file her first bill, which sought to reduce the backlog of immigration applications. In June 2008, the House passed her bill to create an appeals process for individuals wrongly denied rights in homeland- security investigations.

Clarke occasionally goes her own way. In November 2007, she voted against passing a bill to ban workplace discrimination against gays and lesbians because it did not also protect transgender workers. She was one of nine Democrats who voted in December 2007 against a resolution recognizing the importance of Christmas. Because of a conflict with Democratic adviser Howard Wolfson that had lingered after the 2006 campaign, she was the final member of the New York delegation to endorse Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton in the 2008 presidential campaign.

Clarke ran unopposed in the 2008 Democratic primary and was re-elected with 93% of the vote in November. But past conflicts and political changes in Brooklyn could affect redistricting and pose problems for her.