Ayanna Pressley sees America at a tipping point. Even as the novel coronavirus capsized daily life across the globe, the killing of Black people in America remained a constant. “It is this sort of maddening déjà vu,” the freshman congresswoman told me this week. Against the backdrop of the virus, which has disproportionately affected communities of color, it wasn’t just a Minneapolis police officer’s killing of George Floyd, but the deaths of Ahmaud Arbery, Tony McDade, Breonna Taylor, and more. “There’s just so many names,” she sighed. “Black folks are gutted. We are exhausted, and we are resolved.” Yet Pressley is optimistic. As thousands flock to the streets day after day in protest, she is encouraged by a movement that doesn’t appear to be waning.
“It is about every issue. It is about every disparate outcome. It is about every injustice. It is about legislated hate, hurt, and harm that Black Americans have been experiencing since the inception of this country,” Pressley continued. “I am inspired by the multigenerational, multiracial face of this movement. I am inspired by the tenacity of it. You know, when I think about previous movements, the Birmingham movement was 37 days. The Freedom Rides were seven months. The Greensboro sit-ins were six months, and the Montgomery bus boycott was 382 days…. I’m encouraging people to keep protesting, keep demonstrating, keep mobilizing, honoring the true spirit of the early inception of the civil rights movement, which we’re still in.”
Pressley’s star power is no secret. As with her fellow members of the so-called Squad—Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Ilhan Omar, and Rashida Tlaib—Pressley’s profile rapidly eclipsed those of traditional arbiters of political power and establishment figures within the Democratic Party after she toppled incumbent Democratic congressman Mike Capuano. But as the country grapples with a crisis within a crisis, Pressley’s profile has only risen; she has emerged as a critical voice and legislator amid the unrest. From her perch in Congress, representing Massachusetts’s 7th district, she has rolled out bill after bill to address the COVID-19 pandemic and racial injustice. Among them: a resolution introduced alongside Congresswomen Karen Bass, Omar, and Barbara Lee to condemn police brutality and racial profiling; a bill cosponsored with Omar and Alma Adams to cancel student loan debt in response to the COVID-19 crisis; legislation with former Republican, now independent, congressman Justin Amash to strip police officers of qualified immunity; the Saving Our Street Act, aimed at small businesses, with Senator Kamala Harris; and a bill with Senator Elizabeth Warren to hold police accountable for not providing medical care to individuals in their custody. Pressley was also a critical voice early in the pandemic in calling on the Department of Health and Human Services to release COVID-19 demographic data, including race and ethnicity, and with Senator Cory Booker, led a congressional call for a Justice Department criminal civil rights investigation into the killing of Arbery.
As a member of the Squad and a Black woman, Pressley could reach portions of the progressive universe that Warren couldn’t; during the presidential primary she proved to be the Massachusetts senator’s top surrogate. And even after the political fortunes of Warren, briefly the shiny object of the primary, shifted, the first-term Boston congresswoman became the subject of one of Washington’s favorite parlor games: “What Will They Do Next?” In February, Politico’s “Playbook” even floated Pressley as a potential vice presidential running mate for Bernie Sanders, as she could assuage intraparty anxieties if the avowed democratic socialist won the nomination. Now, with Biden as the presumptive nominee and under more pressure to pick a woman of color as his running mate, Pressley increasingly has a place in that conversation. “She is someone who is a rising star, and that star is not fading anytime soon,” Rebecca Katz, a progressive Democratic strategist, told me. “You are going to be hearing more and more and more about Ayanna Pressley in the years to come.” The thing about Pressley, Katz added, is that “she has it, the aura.”