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.