16 THENEWYORKER,NOVEMBER16, 2020
1
ST.LOUISD IS PATCH
THESQUADEXPAN DS
C
ori Bush can lay claim to more than
one professional title. She is Pas-
tor Cori Bush, having founded a church
in her native St. Louis, about a decade
ago. She is also Cori Bush, registered
nurse. And now she is Congresswoman-
elect Cori Bush. Her victory, a romp in
Missouri’s First Congressional District
that saw her win by sixty percentage
points, was foretold by the August Dem-
ocratic primary, when Bush, running as
a progressive in the anti-sclerotic mode
of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Ayanna
Pressley, defeated Lacy Clay, the incum-
Looting had begun; a building had
burned. “There were thousands of peo-
ple in the street, with a lot of violence
happening. I felt like I could offer some-
thing to this situation. I was, like, You’re
a nurse, you can be a medic. You’re clergy,
you can go out and pray with people.”
Through the mental-health clinic
where she worked, she helped set up a
crisis-response team. “We pitched a tent
just a few feet from where Michael
Brown’s body had laid on the ground,
to do grief-and-trauma work.” Her group
partnered with others to provide food,
diapers, and financial assistance to peo-
ple whose lives had been disrupted.
By Bush’s account, she grew up in-
ured to racist treatment from cops. “I
never really questioned it,” she said.“I
saw countless friends abused by the po-
lice, harassed by the police, profiled by
the police, in different parts of town. As
a child, my father was pulled over by
the police so many times, I used to think
that he was a horrible driver, and I would
get so upset, like, ‘Why won’t you drive
right?’” She went on, “I didn’t think hard
on the question of Is this O.K. or not?
Is this right? Because you’re taught in
school that the police are right.” Her
impulse as a girl was to blame herself
for two instances when, she said, officers
sexually harassed her. “It was, like, O.K.,
well, maybe I’m doing something wrong.
Maybe this skirt isn’t the right skirt.
That was the mind-set at that time.”
With the speech-making skills of a
preacher and a nurse’s backbone, Bush
became a leading voice in the Black Lives
offering shatterproof reinforcement for
windows and doors, got more orders
than it could keep up with. Brad Camp-
bell, the C.E.O., invented the product
six years ago, on a hunch: “I’ve always
felt that there was some sort of immi-
nent chaos coming.” His product has
survived sledgehammers and worse—
“we’ve shot it with AK-47 rounds,” he
said, and still no shattering—but it’s
also unobtrusive. “It doesn’t make their
building look like an armed camp,” he
noted. “They don’t want to look fortified,
but they want to be fortified.”
By the week’s end, as the vote counts
trickled in and a conclusion neared, the
peace was holding across the country,
but barely. Armed right-wing protesters
were massing outside a ballot-counting
center in Maricopa County, in Arizona.
The N.Y.P.D. was roughing up an elected
official. Trump’s campaign was urging
his followers to “FIGHT BACK.” (Some
seemed to be heeding the advice: police
in Philadelphia said they foiled a planned
attack outside the city’s election center.)
But big business was sanguine. Stocks
shot up, likely at the prospect of a Re-
publican Senate with a Biden White
House—the same friendly tax rates, with-
out the pesky tweets. But where to spend
the extra dough? A spokesman for Tiffa-
ny’s pointed out that its store near Trump
Tower, despite being covered in plywood,
was still open for business.
—Zach Helfand
bent. A member of a local African-Amer-
ican political dynasty, Clay has repre-
sented the district since 2001, having
succeeded his father, Bill, who was first
elected in 1968. Bush, forty-four, isn’t
just new blood. She will be both the
first Black woman and likely the first
nurse to represent Missouri in Congress.
(Sending clergy to Washington, D.C.,
is old hat for the Show-Me State.)
Despite its blue tilt, Bush’s district
contains multitudes. It includes the
St. Louis Cardinals, Anheuser-Busch
headquarters, and the city’s upscale Cen-
tral West End neighborhood, home to
Mark and Patricia McCloskey. They are
the couple who became famous this sum-
mer—and earned a speaking spot at the
Republican National Convention—for
waving guns at Black Lives Matter
marchers while dressed like models in
the most ill-conceived Talbots catalogue
ever. Among the marchers that day was
Bush; her district also includes Fergu-
son, where the B.L.M. movement was
galvanized, in 2014, following the kill-
ing of eighteen-year-old Michael Brown
by a police officer. Those protests are
what propelled Bush into running for
office—something that, as the daughter
of a politician, she had sworn she would
never do. Her father, Errol Bush, is an
alderman and a former mayor of North-
woods, a small city in St. Louis County.
“With all the negativity and all the cor-
ruption around, with everything he had
to fight, I was, like, Why would you sign
up for this?” she recalled over the phone,
two days after her own election.
The gravity of what happened in Fer-
guson had dawned on her only gradu-
ally, as did her anger. “That afternoon,
I was scrolling on Facebook, seeing this
picture of this person laying on the
ground,” she said of the August day
when Brown was shot at least six times.
Police then left his body in the street
for four hours, on a hot afternoon. “I
kept seeing the picture and just not
thinking it was real,” she said. Finally,
“I’m, like, O.K., let me click on this and
see what this is about.” The next eve-
ning, she drove to Ferguson, where a
second night of demonstrations had
begun. “I just drove around, stayed in
my car, and just watched what was going
on. Then, the next day, I actually got
out. It was the fact that the thing didn’t
go away, that it was gaining steam.”
Cori Bush
