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. Read More

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 unsuccessfully 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. Four years later, Yvette Clarke and fellow City Councilwoman Tracy Boyland challenged Owens in the Democratic primary. The incumbent 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 opponent.

Clarke ran 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, running as his father had predicted he would, 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 an arena for the New Jersey Nets basketball team 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 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, though she is slightly less liberal on social issues than her New York City Democratic colleagues. An active member of the Congressional Black Caucus, she was among those in the group who expressed frustration with President Obama’s work on helping minorities. “What we are asking for is that the president use his bully pulpit to look at a more far-reaching, deeper-penetrating jobs initiative … The level of unemployment in our communities is unacceptable,” she told National Public Radio in March 2010. She became the CBC’s secretary in 2011.

In the 111th Congress (2009-10), she took over the chairmanship of the Homeland Security Committee’s panel on emerging threats. In April 2010, after nine months of negotiations with Republicans, she got her bill through the committee to authorize the Homeland Security Department’s research and development arm for the first time. Earlier, in June 2008, the House passed her bill to create an appeals process for individuals wrongly denied rights in homeland security investigations. Clarke also worked with other committee members on cyber security legislation, and after Republicans regained control of the House, she became the ranking Democrat on the cyber security subcommittee.

Clarke occasionally goes her own way. In 2007, she voted against 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 that year against a resolution recognizing the importance of Christmas.

Clarke ran unopposed in the 2008 Democratic primary and was re-elected with 93% of the vote in November. In April 2010, the New York Daily News reported that she had spent more than $3,500 to treat campaign donors to a Broadway show and $5,000 for a Jay-Z concert, and that her campaign was more than $28,000 in debt. But she won easily with 91% of the vote that year. She was also among the five House Democrats who were investigated by the House Ethics Committee in 2010 for accepting Caribbean trips from corporations and later exonerated. She and the other lawmakers said they were unaware of the corporate funding.