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American politician (1907–2007)

Augustus Freeman Hawkins (August 31, 1907 – November 10, 2007) was an American politician of the Democratic Party who served in the California State Assembly from 1935 to 1963 and the U. S. House Of Representatives from 1963 to 1991. Over the course of his career, Hawkins authored more than 300 state and federal laws, the most famous of which are Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the 1978 Humphrey Hawkins Full Employment Act. He was known as the "silent warrior" for his commitment to education and ending unemployment.

Hawkins was born in Shreveport, Louisiana, the youngest of five children, to Nyanza Hawkins and Hattie Freeman. In 1918, the family moved to Los Angeles. Hawkins graduated from Jefferson High School in 1926, and received a bachelor's degree in economics from the University of California, Los Angeles in 1931. After graduation, he planned to study civil engineering, but the financial constraints of the Great Depression made this impossible. This contributed towards his interest in politics, and his lifelong devotion to education. After graduating, Hawkins operated a real estate company with his brother and studied government. While serving in the California State Assembly, Hawkins married Pegga Adeline Smith on August 28, 1945. Smith died in 1966, and Hawkins later married Elsie Taylor in 1977. After retiring from Congress, he stayed in the Washington area because his wife preferred it, living there until his death, which came two months after hers.

Augustus Hawkins succeeded Republican Frederick Madison Roberts who served in the California Assembly for16 years. 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." 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 1934, Hawkins supported the more controversial 1934 California gubernatorial election of Upton Sinclair, a socialist. Although Sinclair lost, Hawkins defeated 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. Hawkins's district was primarily Latino American and African American. During his time in the Assembly, he introduced legislation including "a fair housing act, a fair employment practices act, low cost housing and disability insurance legislation, and workers’ compensation provisions for domestic workers." Hawkins was also a delegate to the National Conventions of 1940, 1944 and 1960, as well as an electoral college 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.”

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 the legendary 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. The cost was $4.5 million and was financed largely by city, county, and state bond measures. The Augustus F. Hawkins Centers of Excellence Program is a federal grants program supporting diversification of the U. S. teaching force. Augustus F. Hawkins High School in Los Angeles, which opened in 2012, is named in his honor.