Digital Extra

3/06/97
Mildred Nichols: Fighting for who decides the issues

By ELLEN LIBERMAN
Journal-Bulletin Staff Writer

Horror-struck, Mildred T. Nichols watched the Democratic party self-destruct from her home in West Berlin, Germany. The party's 1968 convention looked on her television screen like revolution in the streets, as police beat down Vietnam War protestors.

In the confusion, Nichols saw the problem, neatly symbolized by the barbed wire Chicago Mayor Richard J. Daley had erected to keep dissenters from the convention floor: Access to power.

The Democrats may have laid the foundations of the Great Society's social welfare reforms, but the architects were always going to be the same old boys.

"I've never been interested in ward politics," she said recently at her East Side home. "I wanted to open up the political process to women and minorities. I was always interested in, who gets to represent the party at the nominating convention and who gets to define the issues?"

When the tear gas cleared, nearly a fifth of the voters who had pulled the Democratic lever in the 1964 presidential election deserted the party.

Not Mildred Nichols. Within two years, she would put herself in the center of the national political debate at a time when women were beginning to climb the Democratic party hierarchy and advocate for their issues.

She was the state's first minority to serve on the Democratic National Committee, the first African-American woman to cast a vote in the electoral college and one of the founders of the Rhode Island Women's Political Caucus.

"I seized opportunities as they presented themselves," she says with a modest smile.

From 1974 to 1981, Nichols helped craft economic policies as a member of the Rhode Island Port Authority and Economic Development Corporation, tried to advance the fortunes of women as a member of the Rhode Island Commission on Women from 1974-81 and once helped steer educational policies as a member the Board of Governors for Higher Education.

Nichols life as a "policy wonk" began 28 years ago. The Nichols family's decade in Germany was drawing to a close. Husband Charles H. Nichols, an English professor at Berlin's Free University, had accepted a position at Brown University.

Mildred Nichols, looking for something meaningful to do, found it in the New Democratic Coalition, fighting to change the way national delegates were selected.

This is where Nichols, a former teacher from Hamilton, Va., and mother of three sons, dipped her toe into national politics and was carried down a swift-moving current of events.

"Most people today find it difficult to imagine how much had to be done to get good representation," she said.

National delegates were then hand-picked by state party bosses. But after the 1968 debacle, party members elected delegates. Nichols ran as a delegate for Presidential candidate George McGovern and won.

In 1972, she made the next leap, winning a national committeewoman spot at the Miami convention, fueled by a sense of progress that would keep her going during marathon platform debates on welfare, women's rights and mortgages for low-income families.

In the mid-'70s, she went from committees to conventions to caucuses. Nichols represented her state at the Black Political Caucus's national meeting in Indiana and the National Women's Political Caucus, which drew 14,000 feminists to Houston.

In 1976, she retired from national politics, but not public service.

She refocused her energy on education, serving as -- among other things -- President Jimmy Carter's apointee to the National Advisory Council on Adult Education. Now she is executive director of the Rhode Island Occupational Information Coordinating Committee, comprised of departments of state government which provides career information to schools and agencies.

The passions that propelled Nichols and others into politics seem to have faded and party conventions have regressed to orchestrated affairs. But Nichols takes comfort in the thought that many of the policies she fought for have become embedded in the structure of government.

"The thing that bothers me the most now is the widening gap between the well-off and the poor," she said. "There are still lots of battles not yet won."

More Women in R.I. history