Democratic United States Rep. Jasmine Crockett of Texas remembers raising only a few thousand dollars in her first major political campaign. Her opponent was the sort of person known to dominate politics for most of American history: Middle-aged. White. Male. And the only thing surprising about her defeat was that it wasn’t worse.
As election night dragged on, Crockett recounted to Temple’s Black Law Student Association Wednesday, a murmur began to work its way around the room. The county had a history of problems with the vote. Perhaps it was worth holding off on a concession.
Crockett instead channeled her inner Hamlet — “there’s a divinity that shapes our ends, rough-hew them how we will.” It was God’s plan, she told them, for her to lose that night.
“I haven’t lost an election since,” Crockett told moderator Adjoa B. Asamoah, a senior advisor in the Department of Housing and Urban Development.
The congresswoman and attorney regaled a rapt audience with anecdotes over the course of roughly an hour at the Center for Antiracism housed in Mazur Hall.
“She’s just as dynamic as she appears on television,” marveled Africology and African American studies professor Timothy Welbeck. “But beyond that, being with her in the same room, you could really feel the compassion that she has for her constituents.”
Crockett has gained a reputation for her congressional-hearing commentary, most famously an exchange with Republican representative Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia in the spring. As the House Oversight Committee debated whether or not to hold Attorney General Merrick Garland in contempt of Congress, Greene suggested Crockett’s “fake eyelashes” hindered her from understanding the proceedings.
Usually, such a personal attack would end in the offending congressperson’s ejection. But committee chair James Comer, lacking the votes to punish Garland with Greene absent, declined to boot her from the room after she refused to apologize. Crockett, with mock curiosity, wondered aloud if it had just become permissible to, say, denigrate a colleague’s “bleach blonde, bad-built butch body.”
Nearly everyone in the room immediately recognized the query for the dig it was. Crockett delivered one of her patented clapbacks without technically violating House rules. She did, however, catapult the chamber into alternating astonishment, indignation and glee — while launching herself, if incidentally, into the national spotlight.
Taylor-Greene hasn’t spoken to her since, on the floor or off, Crockett said. “And she should keep it that way.”
Only one Black woman served as a district attorney in a major city at the time of Crockett’s campaign for Dallas DA: San Francisco prosecutor Kamala Harris. After Harris, now the Vice President of the United States, inherited the Democratic presidential nomination in July, she named Crockett a national co-chair for her campaign — an unheard-of honor so early in a national career.
When Democrats handed Harris the reins to their convention in Chicago, Crockett soon became the first Black woman to address the floor in prime-time in her first term.
The Lone Star representative credits Harris with both firsts. “If it had been a team effort, I don’t think I’d have been up there,” she said.
Crockett seasoned much of her conversation with the moment — holding forth on voting rights; former president Donald Trump, whom she dubbed “the Orange One”; and the Heritage Foundation’s controversial Project 2025 blueprint for a future Republican administration, from which Trump has repeatedly tried to distance himself in the waning phases of the campaign.
Crockett, the daughter of a Baptist pastor, even commented on Republican attempts to leverage bigotry against transgender athletes into support among Christian, African American and Latino voters.
“The federal government has nothing to do with trans kids playing sports,” she said. “Talk to your school board or something. But that’s not what we do.”
Much of Crockett’s commentary, however, revolved around age-old questions of identity and adaptation: How speechwriters struggled to author an address that matched the voice she made famous, tipping off an endless string of impasses that ended only when Crockett got permission to write the thing herself. How she’d planned to become an anesthesiologist or an accountant before a string of hate crimes at Rhodes College in Memphis while she was a student there nudged her towards the legal profession.
“I’m someone that struggles a lot with doubting myself in my position and feeling I’m not qualified to be in certain spaces,” said Africology and political science double major Sonya-Kay Johnson, the president of Temple BLSA. “But I feel like she really strongly shows that the Black community belongs in any space.”
For Johnson’s vice president at the BLSA, senior communications student Troy Newby, Jr., the defining moment of the night arrived when Crockett compared the scrutiny Harris faced in the campaign to that Trump — a 34-time convicted felon who four years ago figureheaded an attempt to seize the presidency by force — encountered.
Examine resumes alone, the argument went, and the race would be a wipeout. “Yet we’re still in such a turmoil, as a country, to decide who’s the proper candidate to put in office,” Newby said.
“It shows a lot.”
Remarkably unmentioned, by anyone in attendance: Texas goes to the polls next Tuesday, too, sporting a closer-than-anticipated presidential race and a hotly-contested Senate race.
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