Julia Carson
legislator
Personal Information
Born on July 8, 1938, in Louisville, Kentucky; daughter of a teenage single mother; divorced; two children. Religion: Baptist.
Education: Attended Indiana University, 1970-72; also attended College of St. Mary in the Woods.
Religion: Baptist.
Career
United States Congressional Representative, Indiana Tenth Congressional District; member of the Democratic Party. United Auto Workers local office, secretary, 1962-63; Office of U.S. Representative Andy Jacobs, caseworker and aide, 1965-72; Indiana House of Representatives, member, 1972-76; Cummins Electric Co., director of human resources, 1973- 96; Indiana Senate, member, 1976-90; Center Township Trustee and administrator of Indianapolis-area welfare payments, 1991-96; elected to U.S. Congress, 1996; re-elected in the face of national Republican party targeting, 1998.
Life's Work
A liberal Indianapolis Democrat first elected to Congress in 1996, Julia Carson won re-election in 1998 to defeat an aggressive right-wing campaign. The grandmother of two drew on a lifetime of personal resilience and political experience, and was widely considered an astute campaigner whom her opponents tended to underestimate. A strong advocate of government social programs even during the budget-cutting 1990s, Carson nevertheless gained visibility prior to her election to Congress by implementing, while she was a county official, a program that required welfare recipients to work for their benefits.
Carson was born in Louisville, Kentucky, on July 8, 1938. The daughter of a teenage single mother, she grew up poor and worked at a variety of jobs while still a youngster; she waited tables, delivered newspapers, and picked crops on a farm. One of Carson's early memories was of going to a welfare office to pick up a ration of corn meal and lard. Carson attended Indiana University from 1970 to 1972, and later studied at the college of St. Mary in the Woods, but full-time employment beckoned the young woman with two children. She worked as a human resources manager at an electric company, and then opened her own clothing store.
Worked in U.S. Representative's Office
The clothing store failed, saddling Carson with a financial burden that would trouble her for many years. Working as a secretary at a United Auto Workers local chapter in 1965, Carson met the unorthodox U.S. Congressman Andy Jacobs, who had just recently been elected and was looking for a caseworker and aide for his local office. He hired Carson, and came to appreciate her ambition and organizational abilities. When Jacobs seemed to be headed for defeat in the Republican-dominated elections of 1972 (he lost but came back to win in 1974), he encouraged Carson to avoid going down with the ship by running for office herself. Carson ran and won election to the Indiana House of Representatives, and she was elected to the Indiana Senate in 1976. Carson stayed in the Senate for fourteen years, also working as a human resources executive at the Cummins Electric Company.
In 1990 Carson, who at this writing has never lost an election, entered and won an Indianapolis race for the office of Center Township Trustee, seemingly a step down from her state senate seat, but actually an administrative position of considerable power: in this post, Carson was responsible for managing federal welfare payments in central Indianapolis. Although a lifelong believer in government involvement in the amelioration of poverty, Carson soon stepped well out in front of the wave of welfare reforms implemented almost everywhere in the 1990s. Inheriting a program plagued by $17 million of debt and charges of mismanagement, Carson put in place work requirements for welfare recipients and attacked the agency's management problems.
Entered Congressional Race
By 1996, the debt was gone and local property taxes had been lowered. Even the county's Republican auditor praised Carson's performance, saying (according to the Almanac of American Politics) that "Julia Carson wrestled that monster to the ground." When Jacobs announced his retirement from Congress that year, Carson entered the race to succeed him. Jacobs threw his support behind the aide who had worked with him a quarter century before, but Carson faced opposition in the primary from the well-financed Ann DeLaney, who countered Carson's candidacy with a barrage of advertising. Carson won the primary handily, and went on to tackle a general election which observers doubted she could win, given the generally conservative nature of the Indianapolis electorate and the fact that Carson's district was only 30 percent African American.
During the campaign, Carson argued that spending money on education, specifically in the area of computers, would be more effective than expensive anti-crime measures, but her opponents attacked her as being soft on crime. Carson's opponent, stockbroker Virginia Blankenbaker, led early in the race, but her ratings declined when, shortly before the election, several Indianapolis police officers faced charges of assaulting a black pedestrian. In November, Carson won the election by a margin of 53 to 45 percent. Unfortunately medical problems interrupted her ascension to office; she underwent heart surgery in Indianapolis on January 4, 1997, and missed the Congressional swearing-in ceremony while she recovered. She did not make it to Washington until March 5.
In Congress, Carson continued to take liberal stands, favoring restrictions to the U.S.-Canada-Mexico North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), which some contended cost low-wage, unskilled Americans their jobs. Government social activism, Carson was quoted as saying in Ebony, "can work if we are committed to weeding out excessiveness, abuse and apathy." In 1998, Carson became a target of the national Republican party, which poured millions of dollars into a group of Congressional races in the heartland states of Indiana, Ohio, and Kentucky. Whereas Blankenbaker, Carson's first opponent, had been moderate politically, Carson's 1998 foe, Gary Hofmeister, held strongly conservative views. Hofmeister was a protégé of Christian Coalition director Ralph Reed.
Faced Attack Ad
Hofmeister attacked Carson for voting to support President Bill Clinton's veto of a bill that would have outlawed most so-called partial-birth abortions, forcing Carson to respond with an ad stating her opposition to late-term abortions except in cases where the mother's life was in danger. The campaign entered a critical phase when Hofmeister, hoping to revive the charge that Carson was too lenient on criminals, ran a notorious television advertisement in which a picture of Carson metamorphosed into images of hypodermic needles and prison cells. The ad, which recalled the Willie Horton episode of the 1988 national presidential campaign, was too strong for low-key Indiana; Carson, as did most of the incumbent Democrats targeted in 1998, won re-election.
In 1999 Carson, a member of the House Banking Committee, continued to work on issues of importance to her low-income constituents. In February of that year, she announced a new program, supported by the federally-chartered Fannie Mae (FNM) home mortgage agency, that would allow eligible Indiana residents to purchase a home with a down payment of only one percent of the home's value. Carson is a member of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), the Urban League, and the National Council of Negro Women.
Further Reading
Books
- Barone, Michael, and Grant Ujifusa, The Almanac of American Politics: 1998, National Journal, 1997.
- Atlanta Constitution, November 5, 1998, p. K1.
- Business Wire, February 12, 1999, p. 1.
- Congressional Quarterly Weekly, January 4, 1997, p. 59.
- Ebony, January 1997, p. 64.
- Washington Post, October 31, 1998, p. A13.
— James M. Manheim
