Tribute to Professor Bill Leatherberry.

• Author: Stokes, Louis
• Position: Testimonial

It was just over forty years ago that Bill Leatherberry and I met. I hired him to be my Legislative Aide in my Congressional office in Washington, D.C. I had just come to Congress in 1969. My election had made me the first black person in Ohio ever elected to the United States Congress. In 1970, I became one of the founders of the Congressional Black Caucus, the thirteen African American members of Congress who organized themselves as a group to strategize and legislate on behalf of minorities, the poor, disadvantaged, and underrepresented in America. This meant that my role in Congress required me to have a staff that was philosophically and ideologically in sync with my responsibilities and objectives. This was particularly true in the case of my legislative staff. In searching for such persons, I was fortunate to interview and hire such an individual in the person of Bill Leatherberry. Not only did he have the academic qualifications I was looking for in a Legislative Aide, but he also had the desire to be involved in the quest for social justice and economic equality that was at the top of my agenda. It was not going to be easy because it meant we were going to be making waves and upsetting the regular order of how things had been done. This included challenging those in Congress as well as Presidents of the United States. This was a continuation of the civil rights movement of the sixties, and Bill Leatherberry was committed to being involved in helping to change a nation.

One of the first battles in which the Congressional Black Caucus became involved was an attempt to meet with President Richard Nixon over his inflammatory race-baiting rhetoric and insensitivity toward the adverse effects his programs were having on the black and poor citizens of our nation. It was an everyday task to legislatively oppose his budget cuts and elimination of programs of the War on Poverty that had begun to improve the quality of life for blacks and other minorities. It was here that the talents of Bill Leatherberry enabled me to effectively engage in this battle. After our boycott of President Nixon's "State of the Union" appearance in Congress, and the attendant media notice given to it around the world, the President agreed to meet with the Congressional Black Caucus. When we met with him and presented to him a legislative document containing sixty recommendations addressing "the State of the Black Nation," Bill Leatherberry's legislative work oil my...