Барбара Роуз Коллинз: Первая афроамериканка в Конгрессе от Мичигана

American politician (1939–2021)

Barbara Rose Collins (née Richardson; April 13, 1939 – November 4, 2021) was an American politician from the U. S. state of Michigan and the first black woman from Michigan to be elected to Congress.

Collins was born as Barbara Rose Richardson in Detroit, Michigan, the daughter of Lou Versa (Jones) and Lamar Nathaniel Richardson, a Ford Motor Co. employee. She is an alumnus of Cass Technical High School in Detroit, Michigan. She attended Cass Technical High School in 1957. She earned a Bachelor of Arts degree in Political Science and Anthropology from Wayne State University. taking 34 percent of the vote in a crowded eight way Democratic primary. This was tantamount to election in this heavily Democratic, black majority district. She won handily in November and was reelected three more times, each time garnering over 80 percent of the vote. Her district was renumbered as the 15th district after the 1990 census. Collins was a sponsor of several bills that passed into law, including the Food Dating Bill, the Sex Education Bill, and the Pregnancy Insurance Bill. She also introduced the Unrenumerated Work Act in 1991, 1993, and 1994. This bill would have required the Bureau of Labor Statistics to set value on unwaged work such as housework, care work, agricultural work, volunteer work, and work in a family business, and include that value in the Gross National Product of the United States. This measure had been called for in the Forward Looking Strategies resolution passed at the World Conference on Women, 1985. Collins's bill was endorsed by the Congressional Caucus for Women's Issues and by 1993 had 90 co sponsors; however, it failed to pass. Collins was the subject of a United States House Committee on Ethics inquiry in 1995, under suspicion of 11 instances of misuse of funds. In 1996, after she lost the Democratic primary for re election to Carolyn Cheeks Kilpatrick, the inquiry was dropped. After five years out of politics, Collins returned to the Detroit City Council in 2001. She was re elected in 2005 and retired in 2009.

In 1996, Collins was the first congressperson to introduce legislation to make Juneteenth a federal holiday. According to the ACLU of Michigan, "Michigan's own Congresswoman Barbara Rose Collins introduced a bill in 1996 that petitioned the U. S. government to make Juneteenth a federal holiday. In her congressional remarks, she stated, "the dehumanizing and degrading conditions of slavery were unnecessarily prolonged for hundreds of thousands of black men, women, and children, because our American government failed to communicate the truth" (2017). Juneteenth finally became a federal holiday in 2021.

Collins died from COVID 19 at a Detroit hospital, on November 4, 2021, at age 82, during the COVID 19 pandemic in Michigan. According to her son, she had been vaccinated with the Janssen COVID 19 vaccine. According to one of her grandsons, Collins had health issues that contributed to her COVID 19 death despite her vaccination status.

Collins was the aunt of actor and comedian Sam Richardson.