From the March/April 2021 issue.
In 1990, Eddie Bernice Johnson, then a Texas State Senator, told the Chicago Tribune that “being a woman and being Black is perhaps a double handicap.” Despite the challenges of working in a mostly white Legislature and Congress, the Dallas Democrat has broken many barriers in her nearly half century in government. When she won a Texas state House seat in 1972, now-Congresswoman Johnson became the first Black woman elected to the Legislature from Dallas. A registered nurse who began her career at the veterans’ hospital in Dallas, she was the first registered nurse to hold office in the Texas House, the Texas Senate, and, eventually, the United States Congress. When Democrats won control of the U.S. House of Representatives in 2018, the 85-year-old legislator and Waco native became the first woman and the first African American to chair the House Science, Space, and Technology Committee.
At the start of what she’s said will be her final term in Congress—though she has said that before—Johnson spoke with the Observer in January about the U.S. Capitol insurrection, criminal justice reform, and the coronavirus pandemic.
