Barbara Lee Bio
Barbara Jean Lee (née Tutt; born July 16, 1946) is an American politician and social worker who has served as the 52nd mayor of Oakland, California, since 2025. A member of the Democratic Party, she previously represented parts of Alameda County in the U.S. House of Representatives from 1998 to 2025, after serving in both chambers of the California State Legislature from 1990 to 1998. Lee is widely regarded as one of the most progressive voices in American politics.
Throughout her career, Lee has championed antiwar policy, social justice, HIV/AIDS relief, criminal-justice reform, and cannabis reform. She chaired the Congressional Progressive Caucus from 2005 to 2009 and the Congressional Black Caucus from 2009 to 2011. She gained national attention in 2001 as the only member of Congress to vote against the Authorization for Use of Military Force following the September 11 attacks. After an unsuccessful bid for the U.S. Senate in 2024, she returned to Oakland and won the mayoral election in 2025.
Early Life and Background
Barbara Jean Lee was born on July 16, 1946, in El Paso, Texas. She is the oldest of three daughters of Mildred Adaire Parish and Garvin Alexander Tutt, a lieutenant colonel in the United States Army. Born in a segregated hospital, her mother was left in the hallway because the facility refused to assist her. Lee was raised Catholic, attended Catholic schools taught by the Sisters of Loretto, and was the only African-American Girl Scout in El Paso.
Lee’s parents divorced in 1955, and five years later she moved to California with her mother and two sisters. She attended San Fernando High School in the Pacoima neighborhood of Los Angeles, where she worked with the NAACP to become the school’s first African-American cheerleader, graduating in 1964. At age 15, she underwent a back-alley abortion in Ciudad Juárez, an experience she later shared publicly during debates over reproductive rights.
She married Carl Lee, a member of the United States Air Force, and moved with him to England after high school. The couple had two children before divorcing when Lee was 20. After the birth of her first child in 1966, she returned to California’s San Fernando Valley. She later moved to the Bay Area and attended Mills College, where she served as president of the Black Student Union and graduated in 1973 with a Bachelor of Arts in psychology. She then earned a Master of Social Work from the University of California, Berkeley, in 1975, raising her two children as a single mother on public assistance.
Path to U.S. Politics
As president of the Mills College Black Student Union, Lee invited Representative Shirley Chisholm to speak on campus. Inspired by the visit, she registered to vote and worked on Chisholm’s 1972 presidential campaign, serving as one of her delegates at the 1972 Democratic National Convention. Lee has described Chisholm as a formative mentor who encouraged her to run for office. While still a student, she also volunteered at the Oakland chapter of the Black Panther Party’s Community Learning Center and worked on co-founder Bobby Seale’s 1973 campaign for mayor of Oakland. Her Panther involvement led to surveillance by the Federal Bureau of Investigation.
As a graduate student at Berkeley, Lee founded the Community Health Alliance for Neighborhood Growth and Education (CHANGE), a community-based mental health clinic. She then took an internship in the office of Representative Ron Dellums, who represented an Oakland-based district, and eventually rose to become his chief of staff, one of the only African-American women to hold a senior staff position on Capitol Hill at that time. After leaving Dellums’s office in 1987, she returned to the Bay Area and founded a facilities-management company.
Lee entered electoral politics in 1990 when she was elected to the California State Assembly to succeed Elihu Harris, who retired to run for mayor of Oakland. She served three terms in the Assembly before being elected to the California State Senate in 1996. During her time in the Legislature, she became the first African-American woman to represent Northern California in that body and authored 67 bills signed into law by Republican Governor Pete Wilson.
Barbara Lee Career
Early Career (1990–1998)
Lee began her public career in the California State Assembly in 1990, representing an Oakland-area district. She served three consecutive terms and earned a reputation as a determined progressive who frequently clashed with the more conservative Governor Pete Wilson. Despite their differences, Lee successfully authored 67 bills that Wilson signed into law, including the California Schools Hate Crimes Prevention Act and the California Violence Against Women Act. She also worked to defeat California’s three-strikes sentencing law and was an early champion of LGBTQ+ rights.
In 1996, Lee was elected to the California State Senate. Two years later, after Representative Ron Dellums resigned from Congress, she won a 1998 special election to succeed him, capturing 66 percent of the vote. She then won a full term later that same year with 83 percent of the vote, launching what would become one of the longest tenures in her district’s history.
Breakthrough (1998–2008)
Lee represented California’s 9th congressional district from 1998 to 2013. Her district, based in Oakland and covering most of northern Alameda County, carried a Cook Partisan Voting Index rating of D+40, making it one of the most Democratic districts in the nation. She established herself as a leading progressive voice early in her tenure, eventually co-chairing the Congressional Progressive Caucus with Lynn Woolsey from 2005 to 2009.
Lee gained international attention on September 14, 2001, when she cast the only vote in Congress against the Authorization for Use of Military Force Against Terrorists. She explained that she opposed the resolution not because she rejected military action but because the AUMF, as written, granted overly broad war-making powers at a time when the facts of the attacks were still unclear. The vote generated intense backlash, including death threats that required round-the-clock protection from Capitol Police bodyguards. In 2002, she received the Seán MacBride Peace Prize from the International Peace Bureau for that vote.
In 2003, Lee joined President George W. Bush in creating the President’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief (PEPFAR), a landmark program that has provided HIV/AIDS treatment and prevention across the developing world. The following year, she chaired the Congressional Black Caucus from 2009 to 2011, cementing her influence within the Democratic caucus.
Democratic Party Era (2009–2025)
From 2013 to 2023, Lee represented California’s 13th congressional district, and from 2023 to 2025, she represented the 12th district after redistricting. Throughout this period, she remained one of the most consistently progressive members of the House. The National Journal ranked her as voting more liberal than 84.3 percent of the House in 2007, while GovTrack’s 2015 Report Card ranked her the third most progressive member of the House.
Lee served as the United States representative to the 68th, 70th, and 72nd sessions of the United Nations General Assembly. In 2019, she was named a co-chair of the newly formed Congressional Cannabis Caucus and introduced the Marijuana Justice Act to remove cannabis from the Controlled Substances Act. She also introduced the Women and Climate Change Act in 2018 and authored the Shirley A. Chisholm United States–Caribbean Educational Exchange Act to strengthen educational ties with CARICOM nations. By January 2023, she had voted in line with President Joe Biden’s stated position 99.1 percent of the time.
In January 2023, Lee announced a campaign for the United States Senate seat held by Dianne Feinstein. She formally launched her bid in Oakland on February 21, 2023. On March 5, 2024, she finished fourth in California’s jungle primary, trailing Adam Schiff, Steve Garvey, and Katie Porter, and failed to advance to the general election. As she did not seek re-election to her House seat, the defeat also ended her congressional career in January 2025.
Notable Events and Milestones
Lee’s most defining moment came on September 14, 2001, when her lone vote against the AUMF made her a global symbol of congressional dissent and antiwar activism. In 2017, she secured a House Appropriations Committee vote to repeal the 2001 AUMF, and in June 2021, she sponsored a bipartisan House bill to repeal the authorization that passed 268–161, though it never received a Senate vote. In 2019, Lee publicly recounted her experience with a back-alley abortion during a House Oversight Committee hearing on reproductive rights, becoming a leading voice against the 2022 overturning of Roe v. Wade.
Barbara Lee Career Wins
Lee’s electoral record reflects durable support from one of the most Democratic districts in the country. She won her first congressional race in a 1998 special election with 66 percent of the vote and followed it with an 83 percent victory in her first full term later that year. She was subsequently re-elected to the House 12 more times, often by overwhelming margins, before retiring from Congress in 2025.
U.S. House of Representatives Highlights
Lee served in the U.S. House of Representatives for more than 26 years, making her one of the longest-serving members from her district. Her 1998 special-election victory to succeed her former mentor Ron Dellums marked her arrival in Congress, while her 12 consecutive re-election victories underscored her enduring strength at the ballot box. Her final congressional victory came in 2022, when she won re-election to the redrawn 12th district.
Other Wins and Achievements
Before her congressional tenure, Lee authored 67 California state laws and was elected to the California State Senate in 1996. She also co-chaired the House Democratic Steering and Policy Committee alongside Rosa DeLauro and Eric Swalwell beginning in 2018. Her lifetime of public service was recognized with awards including the Seán MacBride Peace Prize, the Peace Abbey Courage of Conscience Award, the Mario Cuomo Act of Courage Award, the Global Exchange Woman of Peace Award, and the Thomas Merton Award.
Barbara Lee Family
Family Background and Political Lineage
Barbara Jean Lee was born into a military family as the daughter of Mildred Adaire Parish and Lieutenant Colonel Garvin Alexander Tutt. Her parents divorced in 1955, and her mother moved the family to California when Lee was a teenager. She credits Shirley Chisholm, whom she met while serving as president of the Mills College Black Student Union, as her political mentor and the inspiration for her career in public service.
Personal Life
Lee married Carl Lee in 1964 shortly after high school and had two sons, Tony and Craig, before divorcing at age 20. She raised her sons as a single mother while completing her education at Mills College and the University of California, Berkeley. Both sons now work in the insurance industry, with Tony Lee serving as CEO of Dickerson Employee Benefits and Craig Lee as a senior executive at State Farm. On New Year’s Eve 2019, Lee married Reverend Dr. Clyde Oden Jr., a retired pastor from Oxnard, and the couple resides in Oakland, California.