Four black women share their political journeys in new book, 'For Colored Girls'

Is it serendipity when you cross paths with kindred spirits, divine intervention, or perhaps a bit of both? 

It's a question worth pondering in "For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Politics" (St. Martin's Press, 357 pp., ★★★ out of four), which chronicles the bonds of friendship and activism that connect political veterans Donna Brazile, Yolanda Caraway, Leah Daughtry and Minyon Moore. 

Written with Veronica Chambers, "For Colored Girls'' (the title is a play on the theater piece by Ntozake Shange) is part history lesson, part political primer. It gives a behind-the-scenes glimpse of political battles ranging from the presidential campaigns of Jesse Jackson to the candidacy of Hillary Clinton, who became the first female nominee of a major party in 2016.

Here are things we learn from the book:

1. Political leaders need coaching, too.

Caraway, whose political involvement began when she was a teenage volunteer for Bobby Kennedy's Senate campaign, became the Democratic National Committee's director of education and training in the 1980s. In that role, she organized workshops to prepare a new generation of politicians.

One of her trainees was a Northwestern University student named Rahm Emanuel.

He "worried the hell out of me for student discounts on the training workshops,'' said Caraway of Emanuel, the mayor of Chicago who was previously President Obama's chief of staff. "He told me he could get a bunch of students to participate if I got them a discounted rate. I did, and he made good on his promise.''

2. Finding a place to retreat and reboot.

Moore, a former assistant to President Bill Clinton and former CEO of the Democratic National Committee, recounts rarefied retreats that connected African-American executives, artists and civil rights icons in a space where they could catch their breath, even as they planned the next battle.

At one of those gatherings, she was able to spend time with Coretta Scott King. "I loved to hear her pronounce my name,'' she says. "Grace under pressure is probably not an adequate description, but she picked up the torch and became our modern-day Esther in the Bible.'' 

3. Dealing with life after Hillary.

Each of the women had to deal with the disappointment they felt in the wake of Clinton's loss to Donald Trump. Daughtry remembers being unable to rise from bed, but after receiving a written message from her father, the well-known minister Herbert Daughtry, she invited volunteers who'd worked with her to dinner.

She says that she had to hold onto the idea that a divine purpose remained. "I have to believe that,'' she says, "or else the whole construct of my life falls apart.''

4. Brazile's tell-all book frayed ties.

The quartet often supported and protected each other as they navigated the corridors of politics and power.  But they acknowledge that Brazile's decision to write her own book, 2017's "Hacks" – a controversial tell-all about her time as DNC chair during the Clinton campaign, which the friends had feared would conflict with "For Colored Girls'' – caused a painful rupture.

"We acknowledge that our circle is frayed,'' the women write. But with faith and "baby steps,'' they say, they trust it will be restored.