When anyone wants to know anything about politics in Chicago or around the nation, I can’t think of one person, male or female, Black or white as politically astute as Delmarie Cobb. She was the first African American woman to serve as press secretary for the Democratic National Committee. Politicians who are fortunate enough to have Delmarie Cobb work as a consultant, or in any capacity in their political campaign, know they’re being represented by the best.
Now, Delmarie has created an organization that gives voice to Black women. The Ida B. Wells Legacy Committee, often referred to as Ida’s Legacy, was named after Ida Bell Wells-Barnett who was an American investigative journalist, educator, and early leader in the civil rights movement. She was one of the founders of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.
Delmarie started Ida’s Legacy following the 2016 presidential campaign. She states, “I was outraged that white women who did not vote for Hillary and had buyer’s remorse, were organizing marches, and forming PACs and protests around the fact that Trump had won. On the other hand, Black women, 94 percent of whom voted for Hillary, were joining in with the white women but we weren’t leading anything. That just got me thinking that in 2008 Black women had gone to the polls and voted at a rate higher than any other group, yet we are not leading the narrative. Everybody else is leading the narrative but us and we should be determining what is happening.” She gives as an example a thirty-year fight that she has been waging to get a Black woman appointed to the Supreme Court. “2008 was the first year Black women came out in record numbers and beat every other group, yet we didn’t get a Black woman nominated to the Supreme Court until Joe Biden became president in 2020” She explains that this is so concerning because from 2008 to 2020, Black women probably had saved this democracy at least four or five times and yet were not organized enough to demand that issues that are of concern to Black women become political priorities when it comes to policies”
“That’s why I formed Ida’s Legacy PAC,” she explains, “Because I saw all these other PACs being formed and I thought we need to make sure that we start supporting and grooming progressive African American women candidates for the next generation.”
One of the things Ida’s Legacy is doing is issuing endorsements. They send questionnaires to candidates. She explains that “ African Americans have more problems than any other group of people adversely on every quality-of-life issue, yet no one had been sending out questionnaires during political season to candidates to see where they stand on issues that are important to us.”
Delmarie started her business, Publicity Works, in 1990, and started doing campaigns in 1988, and during that time she says she has received questionnaires from every special interest group there is. “ If you’re Jewish, if you’re gay, if you love water, if you ride a bike, if you’re into guns, you name it, I get a questionnaire for it,” she says, “but I can count if any questionnaires I’ve gotten are from Black organizations.” Now they are. Now there are questionnaires being put out by Ida’s Legacy, and they use those questionnaires and the candidates’ answers as a basis for their decision to endorse, Once a candidate is endorsed, then Ida’s Legacy takes out ads in selected media based on their money to make sure people know Ida’s Legacy endorsed those candidates. “We encourage people not only to vote for them, but to volunteer for them and to make contributions to their campaigns,” Cobb says, “the list of candidates we endorsed this year is small because so many candidates who are incumbents are not challenged, and if they’re not challenged there’s no reason to endorse.”
Delmarie named the PAC after Ida B Wells because Wells is her shero, and because since 1959 she literally lived across the street from the home of Ida B. Wells, thus learning, at a very young age, about Ms. Wells and her legacy. “When you talk about progressive politics,” Delmarie says, “when you talk about a woman who knew her worth and value and didn’t care if she made friends or not, that’s the true definition of politics and that’s who Ida B. Wells was.”
“ The saying goes there are no permanent friends or permanent enemies, only permanent issues, and that’s the biggest problem some African Americans have.”
Delmarie observes, “We fall in love with candidates, and you cannot fall in love with a candidate. It has to be based on the issues, today I can love you and tomorrow we’ll be fighting. So, we have to understand if you’re not doing and fighting for the issues that are important to African Americans or advancing African Americans then it doesn’t matter who you are.
That’s something we have to learn.” Delmarie went on to point out, “ One of the reasons our communities look the way they do is because we will rally to put someone in office and then sit back on our laurels and think our job is done. Well once you get someone in office, your job has just begun. You have to make sure that person lives up to all the things they promised when they were running, and you first supported them.”
Another political point she made is there is no such thing as the lesser of two evils. She says, “You’ve got to learn that once you get to the general election and there are only two choices, you’ve got to make a choice. You’ve got to decide who you can work with, and who is going to work against you. Once you decide you’re going to vote for someone because you believe you can work with them, then you’ve got to do the work. You can’t just hope they’ll do the right thing. You’ve got to make sure they’ll do the right thing” She cites as an example something that recently happened in the Michigan primary.
“The Arab community decided they were going to vote uncommitted to send a message to the Democratic party that they’re not happy with what is happening between Palestine and Israel. And you can do that in the primary. They said, ‘let’s send a message’ and they organized it in a matter of weeks. The initial goal was to get at least 10,000 votes of uncommitted which is the number of votes by which Hillary Clinton lost the state to Donald trump by in 2016. They reasoned if they could make that case that if they don’t vote for Biden, Trump will get back in, perhaps Biden would stop helping Israel kill Palestinians. They wound up with far more than the 10,000. I heard reporters didn’t think they were going to get the 10,000. They got over 100,000 and two delegates. That’s the kind of strategy we have to have.”
“They can do that in the primary,” she reiterates, “but in the general election, they have to decide who is going to be there for us. We know Trump isn’t there for us, and as mad as they are at Biden right now, do they think life will be better under Trump? Trump is the reason that this is all happening. He knew, when he put the Israel Consulate in Jerusalem that no one on the Palestinian side would forget.”
Delmarie laments the fact that African American women don’t seem to understand how powerful they could be as a collective. “ Given their political power. Black women are literally saving this democracy every election since 2016.”
To learn more about Ida’s Legacy, visit their page at https://idaslegacy.com
