In today’s political environment in Wisconsin state government, it sometimes can be tough to be a Democrat. State Rep. Mandela Barnes found that out the hard way when he ventured into the Waukesha County Expo Center to try and watch Gov. Scott Walker launch his presidential bid last summer.
“I signed in with my real name and e-mail address as did the chair of the Democratic Party [Martha Laning] and the communications director [Melissa Baldauff],” Barnes tells Madison365. “Somebody came up to us and asked if we would like to be put up on stage behind the governor. This was not a very diverse crowd. I was going to be the diversity.”
Barnes laughed and politely declined and went to the back of the expo hall to listen to the governor inconspicuously. “We weren’t there to heckle him, we just wanted to hear him,” Barnes remembers. “It wasn’t long before some guy comes around and says, “Rep. Barnes. Thank you for being here but we’re going to ask you to leave.’ I said, ‘What did we do?’ He said, ‘I’m going to have to ask you to leave.’ He didn’t have to ask me a third time.”
(Photo courtesy of The Capital Times)
Getting booted from Walker’s event was just one of the many indignations Barnes has had to face as a young Democratic representative in the Wisconsin State Legislature. Since first being elected in 2012, Barnes has known only Republican dominance in Wisconsin state politics. “Yeah, I’ve never known a life that was any different than that in my short career. It’s been an uphill battle,” Barnes says in an interview from his office in the State Capitol Building. “But being a minority, it allows the opportunity to make the contrast … to show the deep necessity that we have not only in this [Capitol] Building, but in the communities we represent.
“When you look at a lot of the neglect that takes place and the epidemic of gun violence in this entire state, as a state legislator, I address this as a state issue,” he adds. “There is pre-emption that doesn’t allow cities or counties to enact their own measures to tackle their violence, the state has to act on that issue. With that said, you see the neglect that takes place. We really need to be talking about solutions and we’re not.”
Barnes recently took issue with Republican representative Rob Gannon from Slinger, Wisconsin, who said Milwaukee’s black residents, rather than the state’s Republican governor and GOP-dominated legislature, were an “anchor holding back the ship of state as far as jobs is concerned.”
“He uses a lot of language that creates fear – especially racial fear. It was very unfortunate,” Barnes says. “I called him out on it on the floor and I called him out on it again this week. Those are things that you deal with being the minority.”
Barnes says that there is one specific area – Milwaukee – that is too often neglected by legislators in the Capitol Building.
“As a person who lives in city and enjoys the city of Milwaukee and believes it has so much to offer and wants the city of Milwaukee to be the best city it can be, when Milwaukee is the best city it can be, the state of Wisconsin is in a much stronger place,” Barnes says. “I think everybody wants that.”
Barnes has a strong history of community organizing in the 11th state assembly district, which covers the northeast corner of the city of Milwaukee and half of the city of Glendale. “It’s the district that I’ve spent most of my life in,” Barnes says. My dad was a union auto worker and my mom was a public school teacher.”
Barnes graduated from John Marshall High School and went on to attend Alabama A&M University. In college, he became very active in organizations like the NAACP and Student Government Association, which, he says, gave him his first taste of political activity and community service.
Immediately after college, in 2008, he got his first real-world experience in organizing with the Democratic Campaign Management Program. He was a field organizer on a congressional race in Northwest Louisiana. “I had a lot of freedom and the opportunity to engage different communities,” Barnes remembers. “That’s where I really cut my teeth. You can see politics play out on television but until you actually see the day-to-day grunt work, you have no idea what it is all about. At first, it was very overwhelming, but once I got into my groove I found out that I really liked it.”
In 2009, Barnes made his way back to Milwaukee and found himself in the office of Milwaukee Mayor Tom Barrett as an unpaid intern. That position lead him to the front desk as the receptionist in the office. It wasn’t the ideal job for Barnes but it allowed him to interact with the public as the front line of the office and he got to make a lot of contacts.
Soon, Barnes would find a job as the director of Milwaukee Inner City Congregations Allied for Hope (MICAH), an interfaith, social justice-based community organization. MICAH is comprised of over 30 congregations mainly in the inner-city, but including surrounding areas. The focus of his work and the entire organization was jobs and economic development, education, immigration, and treatment instead of prison.
“In 2012, I had the opportunity to run for office and after thinking about it I made the decision and decided to go for it,” Barnes remembers.
Barnes was successful in that endeavor, where he defeated Jason Fields, an incumbent member of the Wisconsin State Assembly. Barnes’ key issues were — and still are — employment, education, and treatment instead of prisons.
“I haven’t strayed too much from those issues,” he says. “I feel like I’m a good person to work on these issues because I have lived through them myself. I feel like I have had the life experiences that I can relate to people struggling with those issues. There was a point in my life when I was on food stamps. There was a time when I was briefly unemployed. Do you want to talk about gun violence? I lost two friends in high school to gun violence.”
When he spends time in his district, these are all issues that come up consistently with his constituents.
“Almost everybody is going to know somebody who is out of work and looking for a job. Education issues are also very important to people in my district,” Barnes says. “I always make the case to people that I didn’t go to some fancy private high school; I went to a school that faced some significant challenges with its students. Schools are always going to be an issue that are on people’s minds.”
And crime. People in Milwaukee are worried about crime. “People have to understand how that all works together,” Barnes says. “If people are able to go to school and people are able to have opportunities and able to get a job … as job numbers increase, crime numbers decrease. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to understand that.
“When we talk about jobs, we also want to make sure that we are exploring and embracing new industries – green technology being one of the biggest,” Barnes adds. “There’s a place for the city of Milwaukee and a place for the state of Wisconsin to be very active in that arena. There are so many different opportunities for people to be put back to work and we have to be creative about that.”
“I feel like I’m a good person to work on these issues because I have lived through them myself. I feel like I have had the life experiences that I can relate to people struggling with those issues. There was a point in my life when I was on food stamps. There was a time when I was briefly unemployed. Do you want to talk about gun violence? I lost two friends in high school to gun violence.”
When we look at jobs in new industries, Barnes says, we must make sure that people of color getting involved in this process. “Manufacturing, for example, was once very white and it became a mixed industry. People like my grandfather moved to Milwaukee from Louisiana to work at A.O. Smith [Corp.] just like so many other people who moved from Mississippi and Arkansas and Tennessee to Milwaukee, Detroit, Chicago, Indiana,” Barnes says. “Those weren’t jobs that always attracted black people, but it became that way. I think that that space has to be created and open when we speak about new green jobs, when we speak about tech, and when we think about entrepreneurship.”
Serving on the Assembly Education Committee, Barnes says that education is what he has worked on the hardest lately. “What can education look like? What can we do to make education better and stronger?” Barnes asks. “I’ve put a major proposal out there – the Community School Model – because we understand that there are too many factors out there in our communities that are making it very difficult for our young people to learn. We need to identify those barriers first and then we need to find creative ways to alleviate those barriers.
“The biggest short term goal I have is addressing the way that we educate our students,” he continues. “You can come up with whatever charter or voucher system you can come up with, but if you are still missing the core needs – there will be no difference. We need to address the root cause of what it takes to address education in our communities. My goal is to get those needs addressed.
“Long term, I want to help make Milwaukee a first-class city in this state and a first-class city across this entire country,” Barnes adds. “I absolutely believe that we have the ability and the resources to make it that way.”
