Meet the woman who speaks for Hillary Clinton: Karen Finney [View all]

[sufrommich]

Race issues strike a personal chord with Karen Finney. Her African-American father’s last name, Finney, comes from the man who once owned the family as slaves. Yet her mother, Mildred Lee, is the great, great, great niece of Robert E. Lee—or “the General,” as he is referred to within the family.

“That is my American story, a mixed race heritage that I am proud of, just as Virginia, the South and our country has a mixed history,” she wrote in a 2010 Huffington Post column decrying Virginia Gov. Bob McDonnell’s decision to celebrate a Confederate History Month without mentioning slavery.

Finney is the daughter of a civil-rights-lawyer father and a labor-negotiator mother. She moved with her mother from New York to Berkeley at age 7, attended UCLA, and worked as a teaching assistant in a minimum-security facility for pregnant teenagers in Los Angeles. That experience kindled a passion for public education and eventually launched her into a career in liberal politics.

She’s been in the Clinton orbit since the early 1990s, when she was drawn to presumptive Democratic nominee Bill Clinton after his visit to riot-torn Los Angeles in 1992. Clinton, she recalls, “didn’t demonize these young people.” In the 1990s, Finney joined the Clinton White House as the First Lady’s deputy press secretary and later as a traveling press secretary on her 2000 Senate campaign.

http://fortune.com/2015/05/27/karen-finney-hillary-clinton/