Speaking Truth to Power - Anita Hill [154]
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
My mother and father delighted in their children’s singing in church. It was not enough that we sang with the children’s choir; they wanted us to perform in smaller groups. Joyce, Carlene, John, and Ray were required to learn the gospel songs popular during the time of their upbringing. By the time JoAnn and I were old enough to remember the songs performed by the Staple Singers, we, too, were expected to sing them as a duo in church services and musicals. When my mother mercifully forgot to request our singing, her partner, Miss Mattie, took over. “I’d like to hear a song from the Hill Sisters,” she would say.
Though more of a homebody than I, JoAnn disliked public performance slightly less than I did. Each time, I dreaded the long walk to the front of the church whether to deliver the requisite Mother’s Day and Easter poem or to sing “If I Could Hear My Mother Pray Again” (Mama’s favorite). But we never quivered, nor did our voices shake. That would have been unthinkable. When I complained that I did not like being in front of a crowd, my painfully shy mother advised me that I would “just have to grow out of that.” In 1991 at age thirty-five, I finally understood just what my mother meant.
“Why did I agree to do this?” I asked myself repeatedly as I traveled to Coronado, California, for my first public presentation following the hearing. Ruth Mandel, director of the Center for Studies of Women in Politics at Rutgers University, invited me to speak to a bipartisan group of women politicians. Though she assured me that the reception from these politicians would be better than the reception I experienced in Washington, I still dreaded my appearance. Shirley Wiegand traveled with me for the conference. She had been there for the worst of the hearing. It was only fair that she should experience some positive aspect of that ordeal. I had been so busy that I had no time to finish my remarks before leaving Oklahoma. Fortunately, Mandel had indicated that my comments needed to be about fifteen minutes in length. I worked on the airplane and completed a speech about sexual harassment entitled “The Nature of the Beast.”
The extraordinary mood of the crowd on the evening of November 15, 1991, in the Hotel Del Coronado can only be compared to that of an audience at a rock concert. It was electric. Moreover, it was prophetic. Like no other, that evening foretold the dynamics of the engagement of women on the issue. Four law professors, Kimberle Crenshaw, Susan Deller Ross, Deborah Rhode, and I, addressed the assembly of women politicians to cheers and shouts of appreciation. Never have law professors ever been so enthusiastically received. On that evening the normally self-possessed, even sober, political leaders were boisterously disorderly. They shouted and whistled and stood on their chairs to applaud. For punctuation they waved pink napkins in the air over their heads like they were brandishing lassos. Neither the speakers nor the audience was used to this kind of reaction. Mandel, the conference organizer and a veteran in the study of women political candidates and involvement, was ecstatic about what she witnessed. These women foretold an era of renewed involvement as they summoned into being the political “year of the woman,” election year 1992.
Back in Washington the Senate was considering the Civil Rights Act of 1991. The bill had been supported by Jack Danforth before the Thomas confirmation hearing. During the hearing he had threatened some of its supporters with withdrawal of his backing unless they voted to confirm Thomas. President Bush had threatened to veto prior proposed legislation. When the bill came up for reconsideration after the hearing, it did so in the midst of the rhetoric which declared aversion to harassment. Passage would mean restoration of civil rights protections recently