Women Who Travel Podcast: Carol Moseley Braun on a Travel-Filled Political Career

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Lawyer, political pioneer, and activist Carol Moseley Braun has some career stories to tell, many of which she shares in Trailblazer, her new memoir. Lale chats with Braun, who in 1992 became the first Black woman elected to the US senate, about crossing paths with Dr. Martin King, Jr., campaigning alongside the likes of Maya Angelou and Gloria Steinem, and lessons learned from the communities she served as US Ambassador to New Zealand and Samoa.

Lale Arikoglu: Hi, there. I'm Lale Arikoglu, and on today's episode of Women Who Travel, I'm talking to a lawyer, political pioneer and activist. She's Carol Moseley Braun, who in 1992 became the first Black woman elected to the U.S. Senate. She served seven years as a Democrat representing Illinois. A lifelong traveler, she says becoming U.S. Ambassador to New Zealand and Samoa in 1999 was a dream come true, and today she chairs the United States African Development Foundation.

Ambassador Braun's memoir, which is in bookstores now, is called Trailblazer and dedicated to her grandmother. Her ancestors moved north in the Great Migration. They were farmers from Alabama and musicians from New Orleans, and now she's talking to me from her home in Chicago. How is Chicago because it is pouring with rain in New York?

Carol Moseley Braun: Very nice. It's beautiful, and it's not raining or snowing, more the point. The weather is really quite lovely, and I live right across from a park, so I'm here in Madison Park and enjoying the birds flitting around and the beautiful greenery and the scenery is just gorgeous, and so it really is lovely being here.

LA: You obviously have had an extraordinary career in politics. We will get all into this later, but you are in Chicago where you were born and raised. Talk a bit about how you were aware of segregation when you were growing up in Chicago. In your book you talk about how your mother had to endure that while giving birth to you in a Chicago hospital.

CMB: Well, my first introduction to it was the fact that we lived in a, it was actually a transitional community in the sense it was going from all white to all Black. And so we were in the middle of that transition, and that on top of the fact that when I was born, the nuns at the hospital where mother was, had designated me as being white. And of course I'm obviously not white, and so I went with my birth certificate saying I was white until I was in the state legislature when I was finally able to get it changed. I tried to get it changed just going to the passport offices, and of course they looked at me like I had lost my mind and, yeah, that's part of my background too.

LA: You say in the book as well that you are a descendant of the deep south and its people, and you carry with you its culture and its history. How has that legacy stayed with you?

CMB: I value my experiences in The South. That was my first travel. My very first travel was to The South, and my great-grandparents had a farm, and still do, in Alabama, and so I would go and spend summers on the farm in Alabama and came to love that culture, that lifestyle. And I still do. I mean, I would love to take my grandchildren to the farm. We still have it. I think they would love it.

LA: What was the culture and the lifestyle on the farm then, describe that to me?

CMB: It was very antique. I mean, it was like people that lived a hundred years ago, I would imagine. And my folks would take us down there for purposes of the spring break or whatever time we had off from school. And it was a wonderful growing experience. I had a chance to commune with nature and listen to my great-grandmother, who had been a midwife by the way, listen to her adventures. In that regard it was really wonderful. I came to enjoy the south particularly because people, they'd go out of their way not to be rude. It's a study in contrast, you have on the one hand, people who are trying not to be rude and then great violence. So you have the contrast in The South.

LA: Your father had a musical career and had ties to New Orleans. Were your parents hosting parties that were filled with jazz music and musicians, and what was that backdrop like to your childhood?

CMB: I was grateful to have a chance just to hang around and meet some of these people who's now they're giants in music and in jazz particularly, but I met some of them personally when I was yet what, 8, 9, 10 years old. And it was a great honor. And you can imagine now these many years later, I can tell people I met Thelonious Monk and I met Miles Davis, and I met a lot of the jazz types from that era.

And it was really a lovely way to grow up because my parents had this open door policy in the sense that there were people from all over who were jazz men and women. There were a couple of women too, by the way, but there were people involved with jazz at every step of the way, and I was grateful for that.

LA: Did it make the world start to feel bigger to you? That must have sort of opened a door to possibility to meet all these people?

CMB: I think that's one of the things that imbued in me a love of learning and so it was not lost on me that these were people who were striving to be intellectuals. And it was a whole community of people, not just jazz. My grandmother sang classical. She was a vocalist, and my uncle played saxophone. My dad played saxophone also, so he was in a number of bands, and both my mother and my aunt saw as, fancied that they were singers, but they weren't.

LA: But good for them.

CMB: They would stand in. Yeah, yeah, they would stand in when somebody didn't show up for a performance. I'm third-generation Chicagoan. I love being a Chicagoan. I know this city like the back of my hand, and it's an unusual city in the sense that we now have a Pope. I'm not Catholic anymore, but I was glued to the television watching him ascend to the papacy.

LA: Tell me a little bit about those early days in your childhood in Chicago. Set the scene to me. What was it like living there then, and how did that shape you?

CMB: Chicago gave me a grounding, which was very important later in life. I had no idea at the time, but it was very important to me and to my family, and so it's been a major influencer in terms of who I am today. I don't know if you're aware of this, but Chicago was founded by a Black Haitian, Jean Baptiste Point du Sable. And in fact, what used to be Lake Shore Drive is now named after him, but it was very segregated when I was coming up.

LA: At the age of eight, Carol found herself being bused across Chicago to desegregate an all-white school.

CMB: My parents sold or moved out of the real ghetto because long time Black people were not allowed to live outside of a particular area in Chicago. And so my parents call themselves breaking the mold, and they bought a house in a very nice area. It's still nice, actually. I go back there from time to time. So they bought a house to raise us in and then it turned out that we couldn't go to the school that was walking distance from the house because of all this noise about segregation going on. And so we wound up having to take a bus to go to the school.

As kids we didn't know exactly what all this conversation was about and why they were doing this, but nonetheless, you go along with the program. I felt like I was a lost ball in tall weeds my mother would say. I didn't know what was going on. I also didn't understand why this was happening. It gave me an understanding of the whole desegregation process. And quite frankly, that was a little traumatic, a little nothing, very traumatic.

LA: Ambassador Braun's career path was formed on a hot August day in 1966 in Chicago. Martin Luther King had come to speak at a rally and a march to protest racial discrimination in housing. It was a day immortalized by an image of Dr. King falling to one knee as a rock hit him in the head.

CMB: I'd heard about Dr. King from the television and the news, and then when I started marching with him, I was really shocked at the reaction of people I considered neighbors to him. They started throwing rocks at him. And of course when they did that, the Veterans of the Civil Rights Marches divided us up. And so the people who were true veterans were standing near Dr. King. The women and children were pushed further back from the perimeter, and at the time they must have thought I was a child and whatever. So I wound up being touching distance to him, but I didn't touch him. But when he got hit by a rock and the blood started coming down his face, I started to give him Kleenex or a handkerchief or something to staunch the bleeding. But he apparently was accustomed to dealing with those kinds of situations.

And it wasn't until after the march that one of the guys I was marching with, whose name I can't remember recall, said to me, "We've been through worse and don't let it rattle you." He could see I was coming apart it seems. I guess I was really shocked by the fact that there was such venom, such hatred being directed to him and directed to other people who were marching with us.

So there were some white nuns marching next to me as we were going over to the park and the epithets that were being thrown at them were just so horrible. And I was a little girl who had grown up going to Catholic school, so I was totally, totally outdone that they would speak to a nun like that. So that was my first introduction to real nastiness. I was too young to really understand what segregation was all about, and I was too old to put up with it.

So my parents, my mother was actually was terrified for me. Why are you going over there? You're going to get hurt. Yeah, I was a teenager, right? So teenagers go and do what they follow their mind. In fact, that's set me on a path to nonviolent protests, which is what Dr. King was about, and that was an important development for me that stuck with me over the years. And there's time and time again, I've had to turn to those feelings really to make my way.

LA: You then began your political career, and you started to campaign, something that you have done very much so as a politician. You got to travel all over Illinois and see so much of the state. What was it like to meet a cross-section of people of the state you call home?

CMB: Well, I'll tell you, and I think this goes back to being a Chicagoan, because you don't get a whole lot of edifice. People react badly to people they see as phonies in this state, and that's statewide, that's not just Chicago. But I was able to go throughout the state and just be who I am and people responded. I started off thinking, I'll just go and tell my story and answer their questions, and that's what I did and it worked out fine. I got elected on my first try for the Senate.

LA: How old were you when you got elected?

CMB: How old was I? I had to be maybe 30. Yeah.

LA: What Braun describes as the power of sisterhood from Maya Angelou to Gloria Steinem supporting her Senate campaign coming up.

CMB: Gloria Steinem, Maya Angelou, the most important thing that I got from these fearless women because they were all fearless and they went and did what they believe was right. And that for me was the single most important lesson I could have gotten from any of it.

LA: What are some of the more memorable encounters you've had with some of those women?

CMB: Well, they all made a real impression, but there was Maya Angelou who, it's funny because she come to Chicago, not to see me, but she had come to Chicago for whatever it was. And so as we're going into the hotel to get lunch, this guy says, "Hi, Carol, nice to see you." And she stopped him. She says, "No, you mean Senator Mosley Braun," in this very imposing voice. So she straightened him out and it was like he backed up.

LA: As she should have.

CMB: As he should have, yes. And she was very much a believer in protocol, and I now understand why she did that. She put him in his place so hard that at first I felt, this poor guy, he didn't mean anything by it. But then I again understand why she did what she did, and that was an important lesson for me.

Gloria Steinem, by contrast, she was straightforward and fearless also, but she was a model for me in terms of how to just not let stuff get under your skin. Although I have to admit that I still do, but I didn't. Because of her I learned that you have to rise above it and not let people throw you off your game.

LA: Just to kind of hang on to that point you made about Gloria Steinem, as you admitted, a lot easier said than done. How have you figured that out over the years? What did you take heed from her?

CMB: Well, that you have to kind of hang on to who you are and not let other people define you, to you or to anybody else.

LA: One thing that you passionately spoke out about against on the Senate floor was the use of the Confederate flag. How did you get to that point where you were like, "I have to speak about this on the Senate floor," and how did you think about it in the context of just its symbol in America and its presence in America?

CMB: I was on the Judiciary Committee, and a staffer alerted me to the fact that one of my colleagues was trying to get a patent renewed for the Confederate flag. Now, they had been doing I gather for 20-something years. It was just a matter of routine, but as far as I was concerned, if it was routine, that was wrong. And then it was important to not allow a patent on the Confederate flag. After many false starts, I actually wound up winning that battle.

And I won in part because of the senator from an Alabama who was an old man at the time, he's no longer with us, but he was wonderful. Howell Heflin was his name, and he stood up and said his grandfather had been a general in the Confederacy and that this bill was wrong and that people should listen to what I was saying about what it meant to the larger world. And he urged a no vote on the renewal, and that's why I won the battle.

LA: In 1999, President Clinton nominated Carol for the diplomatic service after the break. The very idea of an ambassadorship was a dream, writes Braun in her memoir. She admires the tolerance she witnessed across so many aspects of society in New Zealand and Samoa, and calls her three-year appointment ambassador to paradise.

After your time in the Senate, you then got to do something quite different, which was to be the U.S. Ambassador to New Zealand, which you did from 1999 to 2001, a job that comes with so much travel. What was your relationship to travel before you became an ambassador?

CMB: I had always enjoyed road trips with my parents, my family. we went to the national parks, we went all through The South. So that was in the days when Black people could not stay in most hotels. There was something called the Green Book that they would follow for directions, where can you stay comfortably?

So I started traveling doing the national parks and getting around the United States with my family. By the time I got to New Zealand, I was already a traveler. I had traveled many times at that point, and I tried my best to because I was so curious. I mean I'm still a great fan of the travel shows and that sort of thing because it broadens my horizons and opens the doors, opens my eyes to other people's lifestyles. Frankly I'm grateful for it because it has made me a bigger person. It's really has helped me understand because my curiosity and my curious nature, I've always wanted to understand why other people are different than I am.

LA: During your tenure as ambassador, you went on some whirlwind visits. Tell me a couple that were the most memorable because you must have gone to some extraordinary, extraordinary places.

CMB: I was not only ambassador to New Zealand, but also Samoa, which is as a smaller country. And going to Samoa was important to me because I a, learned there was so much to learn. Everything from the war in the Pacific, which of course it affected my father's generation tremendously, which he never shared details. I don't know, I frankly don't know if he saw action over there, but I got a chance to meet some of the locals who told me horrifying stories about how the American GIs had left children behind.

I tried briefly for a minute to try to get citizenship for those people, those children, but was not successful. I gathered the State Department had drawn a line in the sand and said, "No, we're not doing this. These people are not going to be Americans."

LA: Samoa, I feel like to so many people, it's like you know it's in the Pacific. You know it's very far away, and then I think that's where a lot of people's knowledge stops. Describe it to me a little bit?

CMB: Well, in addition to being very beautiful, there were things about that culture that took me aback. For example, they had had a traditional way of handling disputes so that if somebody had offended somebody else, the whole village would come together and decide whether or not that person should be punished or not. And so that individual would sit in front of the compound with a tapa on his head and wait for the verdict to come from the community. I mean, it was their version of the jury system.

They also had something that were called the Faʻafafine. The Faʻafafine are like a third gender, and they are primarily entertainers, and they're integrated entirely into the society. I did not know before that experience that there were communities in which a third gender was taken as a matter of course, and that was another learning from Samoa. So they had, again, the way the society was structured was a lot more collaborative than we have.

LA: Obviously, you also got to spend a lot of time in New Zealand, a country that's had three women prime ministers. You overlapped with Helen Clark. What were your learnings about New Zealand's politics and what you could learn from them and from these women you were going to work with?

CMB: Well, I learned a lot for the women, and what I discovered was that on the other side of the world, that people didn't see things the same way that we do here in the United States. New Zealand was to the left of anybody I'd ever known in my life, and so that was a learning experience for me. I will never forget sitting in one legislator's office because I was making the rounds, my job, right? And I looked over and said, "Who is that? That picture looks awfully familiar to me." He kind of started laughing. He goes, "Oh, that's Karl Marx." Something that would never happen in the United States.

LA: How much did you get to learn about the Maori community in history in New Zealand?

CMB: I was made honorary Te Atiawa, which is one of the Maori tribes, and of course being brown-skinned, I related to the Maori as the minority, which they still were in their own country. I guess learning a little bit about their history and how they had survived was very interesting to me. That was the big part of my learning experience in New Zealand was getting to know different Maori tribes. And again, they are different from the south to the north, and the Pakeha actually have an interesting relationship with the Maori. The Pakeha being the white Europeans, they have an interesting kind of collaboration with the Maori people from what I could tell. You get versions of the history from people with different perspectives, and that's what I did. It helped me learn about where I was and really enjoy where I was better.

LA: Which is I'd say a rule of thumb when you're visiting anywhere, even if you're not in the role of ambassador.

CMB: Let me say, because you said something a minute ago that just kind of rang a bell. I had a dinner party one night at the ambassadorial residence, and when the dinner party was over, we all repaired to the living room. The seats were all taken so I just sat down on the floor and I got a pitcher of water and I started pouring glasses of water for everybody. It actually made the news. I was stunned. It made the news. It's like American ambassador, whatever. It's like, why wouldn't I serve my guests some water? I mean, seriously.

LA: You're like, "I'm the host."

CMB: So, yeah, exactly.

LA: Another extraordinary place you got to go to was Antarctica. What was the focus of that trip?

CMB: Well, I was going to check on our, because we have an outpost in Antarctica, and I was going as part of my ambassadorial duties to check in on the scientists who were there. And I actually saw Shackleton's Hut, the great turn of the century adventure. I actually got to go to his hut. There was a box of Heinz ketchup still there in Shackleton's Hut, and I'm thinking, why would this be here? At the turn of the last century that's among the supplies they would've taken with them, and they did.

LA: What did you learn from the scientists?

CMB: The scientists were very coy, and in fact, I've tried to ask them about climate change because I had heard about it and they were, like I said, very coy about that and didn't want to talk about it because I guess they thought it was too controversial. I had hoped that they would share some of their scientific insights about it to me with me, and they were hesitant to do that. And so I wound up not getting much learning about climate change, even though I got a chance to see some of the ice pieces that they drilled. And so to me, that made the trip worth it because I got a chance to see the thick layers, the thin ones. It was like a kaleidoscope.

LA: Well, I guess the inside of a tree trunk, you see the rings of time.

CMB: Depending on the climate, yes.

LA: Did it feel sobering to see that ice, especially now 20 years on or 25 years on, and thinking about how much the climate has changed just in that period?

CMB: Well, it was scary. Let's start with that. It was a little scary. Also, the other thing I learned about the Antarctic itself was that they had what they called the dry valleys. There were parts of the Antarctic that didn't have snow on them. They had sand, but no snow. And I was little taken aback and surprised by that.

LA: In the early aughts, Braun founded an organic food company. She regarded it as an extension of her commitment to sustainability, the environment and healthcare reform. Her love of the French countryside was an inspiration.

CMB: We stayed in business for 11 years, even though it was a start-up with no funding, we didn't have enough capital to do it, but we stayed open for 11 years and I learned an awful lot. I had not been an entrepreneur before, but I learned a lot. And so back to curiosity. So this is my first time being a business owner, and so I went through all the steps to do that and to do it properly, and I think I did. I provided, created some jobs, inner city jobs that people could take, and so I felt good about that, and we lasted 11 years. That's the best I can tell you.

LA: And then from a startup running the business for 11 years, you then decided to take on writing a memoir. How long did it take? How long did you work on a memoir for or is it something that's just always been work in progress given your work?

CMB: I'm a lawyer and unfortunately what that means is that I write like a lawyer, and if you've ever read a brief, then you know what I'm talking about. It's bad. And so I wanted somebody who could translate my experiences into something, into literature that people would want to read, and that's what I found. And so hopefully that will open the door in terms of people who are similarly curious as I was.

LA: Well, that sounds like a perfect note to wrap things up on. Ambassador, it's been such a joy talking today. I feel like you have given me so many stories and been so generous with your time, so thank you.

CMB: It's been my pleasure. Thank you.

LA: Thank you for listening to Women Who Travel, I'm Lale Arikoglu and you can find me on Instagram @lalehannah. Our engineer is Pran Bandi, and special thanks to Jake Lummus for engineering support. Our show is mixed by Ammar Lal at Macrosound. Jude Kampfner is our producer, Stephanie Kariuki, our executive producer, and Chris Bannon is head of Condé Nast Global Audio.