State Assembly Hawkins was part of a more general shift by African Americans away from the Republican and towards the Democratic Party. Unlike the majority of African Americans, he supported
Franklin D. Roosevelt's campaign for president in
1932. Hawkins favored measures such as the
New Deal, which was wildly popular in the United States at large and the African-American community in particular. Roosevelt would go on to be the first Democratic president to win the black vote, in
1936. In the
1934 California gubernatorial election, Hawkins supported the controversial candidacy of
Upton Sinclair, a
Socialist-turned-Democrat. Although Sinclair lost, Hawkins defeated 16-year incumbent
Republican Frederick Madison Roberts, the great-grandson of
Sally Hemings and President
Thomas Jefferson and the first African American in the California State Assembly. Hawkins would serve as a Democratic member of the Assembly from 1935 until 1963; by the time of his departure, Hawkins was the Assembly's most senior member, as Roberts was before him. Black representation was so limited that "the black strategy for gaining political power was to exercise influence within the Democratic Party through voting for, and lobbying, white politicians." Aside from Hawkins, "Los Angeles blacks had no other political representative in city, county, state, or federal government." Hawkins was a delegate to the Democratic National Conventions of
1940,
1944 and
1960, as well as an
presidential elector from California in
1944. In 1958, Hawkins sought to be
Speaker of the California State Assembly, which was the second-most powerful position in the state, after the
Governor of California. Hawkins lost to
Ralph M. Brown, but was made chairman of the powerful Rules Committee. With an endorsement from
John F. Kennedy, Hawkins easily won the primary and the general election. After the election, Hawkins remarked, "It's like shifting gears—from the oldest man in the Assembly in years of service to a freshman in Congress."
U.S. Congress in 1962 From 1963 to 1991, Hawkins represented California's 21st District (1963–1975), and the 29th District (1975–1991), covering southern Los Angeles County, in Congress. Hawkins was consistently elected with over 80% of the vote in his Democratic-friendly district. He was the first black representative to be elected from west of the
Mississippi River. Five days after the
Voting Rights Act of 1965 was signed into law, the
Watts Riots occurred in Hawkins's district. It was the first of
many race riots in the 1960s. Hawkins urged his colleagues in Congress to increase antipoverty funds, but he did not condone the violence. Due to his light skin and heightened racial tensions, Hawkins had to be careful when he visited his district shortly after the riots. When it became clear that South Vietnam was not stable enough to survive without American backing, Hawkins increased his criticism of the war. After touring South Vietnam June 1970, Hawkins and fellow Democratic Representative
William Anderson drafted a House Resolution urging Congress to "condemn the cruel and inhumane treatment" of prisoners in South Vietnam. The two Representatives also pressured President Nixon to send an independent task force to investigate the prison and "prevent further degradation and death." Hawkins was a founding member of the
Congressional Black Caucus, and served as vice chairman during its first term (1971–1973). During this time, Hawkins succeeded in restoring honorable discharges to the 170 black soldiers of the 25th Infantry Regiment who had been falsely accused of a public disturbance in
Brownsville, Texas, in 1906, and removed from the Army. Unlike other CBC members, he sought cooperation from
organized labor and
white ethnics in order to make his agenda more likely to pass into law. In 1980, Hawkins criticized the CBC as "85 percent social and 15 percent business." Aside from Title VII of the Civil Rights Act, laws that Hawkins was instrumental in passing include: the 1974
Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention Act, a law that provided certain protections to young criminal offenders; the 1978
Comprehensive Employment and Training Act; and the 1978 Pregnancy Disability Act, which aimed to prevent discrimination against women on the basis of pregnancy and of which Hawkins said, "we have the opportunity to ensure that genuine equality in the American labor force is more than an illusion and that pregnancy will no longer be the basis of unfavorable treatment of working women." Hawkins is known best of all for the 1978
Humphrey-Hawkins Full Employment Act, which Hawkins sponsored in 1977 alongside Senator
Hubert Humphrey of
Minnesota. The bill gave the U.S. government the goal of providing full employment; it also ordered that the Chairman of the
Federal Reserve Board must provide Congress with testimony on the state of the economy. However, by the time that the bill made it to President
Jimmy Carter's desk, "the legislation was clearly symbolic." Hawkins later authored landmark legislation such as the
Job Training Partnership Act and the 1988 School Improvement Act. He became chair of the
House Education and Labor Committee in 1984. Hawkins was frustrated from the relative lack of success that he achieved during the 1980s' presidencies of
Ronald Reagan and George H. W. Bush. They were the most conservative presidents since the 1920s, and members of his own party were moving to the right and viewed Hawkins's old-school New Dealer stance as outdated. His greatest setback was
George H. W. Bush's veto of the Civil Rights Act of 1990, sometimes called the Hawkins-
Kennedy Civil Rights Act. It would have reversed six
Supreme Court decisions made in the previous year that had shifted the burden of proof of discriminating hiring practices of minorities or women from the employer to the employee. It remains the only successful veto of a civil rights act in United States history. Hawkins retired in January 1991. Bush would sign a less expansive bill, the
Civil Rights Act of 1991, after Hawkins's retirement. ==Later life ==