HOUSTON (CN) – Elizabeth Warren’s parents were desperate. Her father had suffered a career-derailing heart attack, the family station wagon had been repossessed and Warren, then a middle school student, felt the foreboding as she eavesdropped on her parents’ late night conversations about their mortgage.
In a Democratic presidential candidate forum Wednesday in Houston that included U.S. Sens. Bernie Sanders, Kamala Harris, Amy Klobuchar, Cory Booker, former U.S. Rep. Beto O’Rourke and onetime Housing and Urban Development Secretary Julián Castro, Warren’s story about her family’s struggles stood out.
Sitting on the edge of her seat on the dais in an auditorium at Texas Southern University, pulling up the sleeves on her green jacket, Warren recalled walking into her parents’ room, seeing her mother’s best dress laid out on the bed and her mother in tears.
“She was 50 years old, she had never worked outside the home and she was terrified,” Warren said.
She said her mom put on the dress and her high heels, walked to Sears and got a minimum wage job answering phones. “That minimum wage job saved our home and it saved our family,” she said.
Warren, 69, said years later the most important lesson from that experience sunk in.
“It’s a story about government. And about no matter how hard you work, the rules made by the people in government will still make the big difference in your life,” she said.
She said when she was a girl a full-time minimum wage job in America would support a family of three.
“It would pay a mortgage, it would cover the utilities and it would cover food. And today a minimum wage job in America will not keep a momma and baby out of poverty. That is wrong. That is worth fighting for,” she said.
It’s a story well-polished from stops on the former Harvard Law School professor’s hectic campaign schedule, and it brought the more than 1,000 people, mostly women, in the audience to their feet to close out the She the People Forum.
Founded in San Francisco, She the People is a network focused on increasing the political power of women of color.
Its founder Aimee Allison moderated the forum, alongside MSNBC anchor Joy Reid, and kicked it off with a focus on minority women’s clout at the ballot box.
“Our hope is to advance a national conversation to help voters distinguish which candidates stand with and for women of color in our communities. And let me tell you something, the candidate who does that best and most consistently will win the nomination and the White House in 2020,” Allison said.
She said one in five voters in primaries are women of color.
“We are 25 percent of the voters in the key swing states of Texas, South Carolina, Georgia, Florida and Arizona,” she added.
Allison called each candidate to the stage separately for 20-minute sessions in which they took questions about how they will change a U.S. criminal justice system in which minorities receive harsher punishments than whites for the same crimes, the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program, marijuana legalization, climate change, the wage gap between women and men and the alarmingly high rate at which black women in America die from childbirth.
Sen. Booker, 49, the first black U.S. Senator from New Jersey, said he still lives in the same neighborhood he did when he was elected mayor of Newark in 2006, a position he held until 2013.
Allison said a United Nations report found we have 12 years to sharply reduce carbon dioxide emissions before we reach irrevocable ecological catastrophe and said people of color are more likely to live near polluting plants.