Interview by Meagan Day

Jovanka Beckles moved to Richmond, California in 2005. Back then Richmond bordered on a company town — the Chevron oil refinery is the largest employer in the city, and the city council was staffed almost entirely by politicians the company backed financially.

Beckles had no political background, but as a children’s mental-health worker for the county, she’d seen the hardships of working-class people throughout the Bay Area and felt that the wealthy needed to pay their fair share. New to town, Beckles started seeing yard signs for a Richmond ballot measure that levied a tax against Chevron to pay for social programs, public education, and infrastructure. She supported the idea but thought the language on the sign was overly technical. So she called the group responsible and suggested it should read simply: “Measure T: Taxes Chevron, Not You.”

That’s how Beckles fell in with the Richmond Progressive Alliance (RPA), an anti-corporate, pro-worker independent political organization in the city. By winning a supermajority on city council, RPA has broken Chevron’s stranglehold over the city council.

Beckles has been a councilmember for eight years. In that time, Richmond passed the first rent-control measure in California in three decades, raised the minimum wage to $15 well ahead of the curve, and massively reduced crime and gun violence while also subjecting the police department to more community oversight and facilitating reentry for people who have been incarcerated.

Beckles was born in Panama and immigrated to the United States when she was nine. She attended Florida A&M on a basketball scholarship and has lived in the Bay Area for thirty years. Now she has her sights set on the state house: she’s running for State Assembly in California’s AD-15.

Her opponent this time isn’t Chevron. It’s Buffy Wicks, a former Obama aide who was dubbed “Buffy the Bernie Slayer” in the 2016 primary for her efforts to defeat Bernie Sanders as Hillary Clinton’s California campaign director. Wicks has never held office before and moved to the district two years ago. Even without an organic local social base, she’s pulled in nearly $1.5 million, making this race the most expensive in the district’s history.

Much of the money comes from wealthy donors across the country — and a big chunk of it comes from the pro-charter, anti-union Super PAC Govern for California. You can acquaint yourself with Wicks’s donors at the East Bay Democratic Socialists of America-run website buffywicks.money.

Like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Julia Salazar, Beckles is a member of DSA, and her campaign is endorsed by the group locally and nationally. The contest between Beckles and Wicks is yet another round in the ongoing battle between democratic socialists and establishment Democrats who boast hefty donations from the mega-wealthy — and in turn protect the interests of private insurers, real estate developers, and school privatizers.

Jacobin’s Meagan Day spoke to Beckles about squaring off with a multi-billion-dollar corporate giant, the California housing crisis, the necessity of single-payer health care, the problem with charter schools, and the meaning of democratic socialism.