WASHINGTON (RNS) — When the Rev. Barbara Williams-Skinner celebrated her 80th birthday late last year with a party at the headquarters of the National Council of Negro Women near the National Mall in Washington, she asked for no presents. Instead, each attendee — clergy of different faiths, Washington insiders and young people she has mentored — left with a small gift bag containing a Faiths United to Save Democracy pin emblazoned with the words “No One Group, Faith, or Race, Can Do This Alone.”
Lest her guests think the pin was merely decorative, it was affixed to a postcard with a list of ways to join Skinner’s voter mobilization and protection initiative targeting 10 mostly battleground states.
“Everything I do is about advancement of people who are vulnerable,” she said Monday (Sept. 23), sitting in her home office in Washington with images of civil rights leaders she knew personally like John Lewis and Coretta Scott King. “I’m very goal oriented, I’m very mission oriented. So I would never have agreed to a birthday party just focused on me.”
That emphasis on the poor and neglected, and their historically limited access to the polls, is rooted in Williams-Skinner’s childhood in a depressed neighborhood in the San Francisco Bay area. She was one of eight children of Katherine Williams, a single mother who insisted tha …