Word: adebayo
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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Inside Marsha Coleman-Adebayo there's a streak of Rosa Parks. Certainly, her decade-long struggle to clean up the racially toxic atmosphere at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency could make history...
...original cosponsors are one of the more unlikely political odd couples ever seen in Congress: ultra-conservative Wisconsin Republican James Sensenbrenner and hyper-liberal Texas Democrat Shiela Jackson-Lee. Though they rarely agree on anything, Sensenbrenner and Jackson-Lee say Coleman-Adebayo's testimony at a congressional hearing last fall brought them together on the need for the law. Her story, says Sensenbrenner, made it abundantly clear that new laws "with teeth in them" were required to make the EPA clean...
...Coleman-Adebayo, an MIT-trained political scientist who had held a string of impressive jobs at the United Nations and World Wildlife Fund, her first two years at the EPA during the administration of Bush the Elder were like laboring on a "21st-century plantation." During her earliest days on the job, "I got a very clear sense that I wasn't welcome," she recalls. Just how unwelcome became clear two years later on the eve of Bill Clinton's inaugural. A senior EPA executive told her that she could attend a routine staff meeting only because "we consider...
...over when President Clinton in early 1993 selected Carol Browner, a noted liberal who had worked as an aide to Al Gore, as the EPA's new administrator. "I was pleased to see a woman with a reputation for being sensitive to civil rights issues become administrator," says Coleman-Adebayo, 48. "I thought she would start a dialogue about the abuses that were occurring inside the agency and try to correct them...
That was not to be. Instead of cleaning up the agency's racial pollution, says Coleman-Adebayo, Browner allowed it to fester. "She wasn't at all sympathetic to complaints about civil rights abuses," says Coleman-Adebayo. "We were treated like Negroes, to use a polite term. We were put in our place." In Coleman-Adebayo's case, that meant that even though her work as one of the EPA's representatives to the United Nations conference on women held in Beijing in 1995 won praise from Hillary Clinton and Browner herself, she got neither a raise nor a promised...