She inherited some of that inner drive from her parents.
“I remember my grandmother washing floors and toilets so my mom could finish high school,” Beatty told a group of professional black women in April. “But my mother said, ‘I won’t do that for my girls because I want them to understand that as a black woman there is so much more we can do.”
Beatty became the first in her family to graduate from college — Central State University — in 1972. Within a few years she’d taken an interest in politics, thanks in part to her neighbors, the McLin family. She met Otto Beatty Jr., her future husband, at a fundraiser for now former Dayton Mayor Rhine McLin.
Otto Beatty, a former state representative, said he was enchanted by Beatty’s ability to bring people together. She had, he said, “administrative skills and a lot of imagination. She was a natural.”
When he left the legislature, Otto thought of his wife as a perfect fit. She was elected in 1999, eventually rising to be the first female Democratic House leader in Ohio history.
She cuts a distinctive and effusive presence, said Curt Steiner, a Republican political strategist who worked with Beatty at Ohio State University: “When she walks into a room, she lights it up.”
Ohio State President E. Gordon Gee characterized Beatty’s transition to Congress as virtually seamless. Gee was her boss at Ohio State, where Beatty served as senior vice president for outreach and engagement from 2008 until she resigned to run for Congress in January 2012.
“I think she was made to do this,” Gee said. “She anticipates what we need before we ask her.”
When she arrived in Washington, Beatty talked about working cooperatively with the other party — something every politician talks about, but something Beatty almost reflexively mentions. It is very much a work in progress. Philosophically, Beatty appears to be straight-up Democrat so far, voting with her party an overwhelming majority of the time. But she’s forged good working relationships with Reps. Pat Tiberi, R-Genoa Twp., and Steve Stivers, R-Upper Arlington, and during the State of the Union she sat next to Stivers.
“We have different philosophies, different opinions, but we have a great personal relationship,” said Tiberi, who says the old phrase “you can disagree without being disagreeable” defines his relationship with Beatty.
“I think she wants the delegation to be as cohesive as possible,” Steiner said. “She understands they will have different votes on different issues a large part of the time, but there are some things they can work on together.”
Beatty savors the fact that she is making history. Her election means Ohio for the first time has two African-Americans serving in the U.S. House of Representatives at the same time. (As well as two African-American women.) Her Democratic colleague, Congressional Black Caucus Chair Marcia Fudge of Cleveland, calls Beatty “a breath of fresh air.”
Fudge, who served as a mentor to Beatty throughout her campaign, said the election served notice that an African-American does not have to run in a majority black district to win. Beatty’s Columbus-based district, drawn following the 2010 Census, is about 28 percent minority.
Beatty said she is also proud of the boundaries she’s broken that are unrelated to race and gender. She had her stroke when she was 50. Then a state representative, Beatty had just been at a community luncheon and had returned to the office she shared with her husband when she was stricken.
“Someone thought I was choking,” said Beatty, who held on to her left side. “I could feel something strange happening.”
At that time Beatty thought strokes happened only to older people. “I wasn’t overweight, I was very active, but it says to you listen to your body, understand your cholesterol and other things associated with it.”
While recovering, she made the decision: If they told her she had to do speech therapy three times she would make it six. Same with physical therapy. Otto said she “never had a day where she just gave up.”
She left the hospital in a wheelchair, then wore orthopedic shoes and ankle-molded braces. Within a month, she was on back on her feet and soon after that she was making public appearances.
“And now here I am in two-inch heels,” she says. “Not out of vanity, but to prove a point.”
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