TRIBUTES

Arlene Holt Baker

AFL-CIO

Today the labor movement, the civil rights movement, the women's movement, the immigrant movement and the gay communities have lost a friend. Our friend and a great American hero, Sen. Ted Kennedy, has left us, but he has left us with the greatest legislation of our time that has helped move us closer to the promise of America.

Like so many of my generation, my life is full of memories of the Kennedy brothers, John, Bobby and Teddy. When I think about these brothers, I cannot help but return to that day 46 years ago when I stood with my mother in the parking lot across from the Texas Hotel in Fort Worth, Texas, as President Kennedy and Jacqueline Kennedy came out to the crowd anxiously awaiting to see them. When we left the parking lot that morning—my mother, to catch her bus so that she could get to her job as a domestic worker, and me, to my spelling class at I.M. Terrell Jr. High School—we would have never dreamed that, by the time my mother would be halfway through her domestic duties of that day and me through three class periods, President Kennedy would be assassinated in Dallas. On that day, for my mother and our family, our spirits were darkened, and at that moment, the hope for the promise that President Kennedy symbolized was diminished. We mourned, we cried and we remembered the lessons of our faith; faith is the evidence of things hoped for and not yet seen. We would soon see the passage of the 1964 Civil Rights Act and the 1965 Voting Rights Act.

As a high school student in 1968, I once again was full of hope and promise. We had the dreamer, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., who spoke of America as he hoped it one day would be—and there was another Kennedy, Bobby, who would run for president and renew the hope of Camelot. Little would I know that 1968 would have such an impact on me. My father died in a car accident on March 9, 1968; April 4, 1968, would be the day the Dreamer would be killed and June 6, 1968, Bobby, like his brother, would lose his life as the result of an assassin's bullet. Once again, hopes and dreams crushed.

Then there was Teddy: It was 1980, and once again I was hopeful. I was a Kennedy delegate in 1980. I still recall those days before the convention, knocking on doors throughout my community, talking about the importance of having universal health care and how we would get it if Ted Kennedy became our 40th president of the United States. That was not to be, but I never stopped believing in Teddy Kennedy and working and supporting all that he stood for and fought for.

On Sept. 21, 2007, when I became executive vice president of the AFL-CIO, Sen. Kennedy called me at home that evening and congratulated me. After some small talk and a Kennedy joke, we spoke about workers' rights and health care. Today, I remember that conversation and I can hear his unmistakable voice ringing in my ear. Ted Kennedy will always be in my heart—and today I mourn him but, unlike 1963 and 1968, I am not hopeless. On this day, I am filled with hope and a fighting determination to see Sen. Kennedy's dream of health care reform become America's reality.