{lives remembered}


Natasha Pettigrew 1980-2010 For Senate hopeful, ordinary challenges were never enough


n by Melissa bell N


atasha Pettigrew stood on the shore of Virginia Beach looking out at the choppy, wild waves of the sea before her first triathlon in 2005. Some of her fellow competitors demurred; conditions were rougher than expected, too risky, they thought, for the race’s first leg. ¶ “I saw Natasha standing there in her wet suit, staring at the water,” said her mother, Kenniss Henry. “I thought,


She’s going to swim. She’s going to do it.” ¶ Pettigrew did. She charged in, dove under a huge wave and swam the kilometer out and back to shore. She came bounding out of the sea, grinning and waving to her mother. “My heart was in my throat, and she’s gushing about how cute the lifeguard was!” Henry remembered. ¶ The challenge of that first race had Pettigrew hooked. But five years later, she would dive into a very different kind of race, where the prize was not a medal but a U.S. Senate seat.


Pettigrew, 30, had spent her Wash-


ington-area childhood tagging along with her mother to political demon- strations, museums and documentaries about social issues. Henry said Petti- grew was a statistic: the child of a single, black mother. But Pettigrew, who grew up watching her mom work three jobs to make sure her daughter could get a good education, wanted to show that hard work could overcome the dire pre- dictions often lobbed at women such as her. She took a leave of absence from her final year of law school at the Uni- versity of Miami and returned to Largo with plans to run for Senate. Pettigrew knew the race would be an


uphill battle when she walked into the office of Brian Bittner, the co-chair of the Maryland Green Party, and asked if his party would back her candidacy. It was a bold request, given that she and Bittner had not previously met. “We don’t really relish being in the


role of the underdog,” Bittner said. “But we try our best to get our voice out there.” Pettigrew hadn’t been active with the party before, but her values lined up with theirs: social justice, environmental issues, feminism and grass-roots democracy. Pettigrew’s en- thusiasm, and her willingness to enter the long and likely unwinnable battle, persuaded Bittner that she was the right voice for speak for the party.


The official campaign photograph


on her Web site (headlined “Natasha for Senate: Running for the People!”) shows Pettigrew wearing a huge smile. Her hair is long and loose. Her face gleams with excitement. She relished time out in the field, meeting new peo- ple, stumping on ways to strengthen the education system, advocating for health care reform, talking to children about the need to stay in school. That she was a third-party candidate running against incumbent Barbara Mikulski — a Democrat popular with voters and the longest-serving female senator in U.S. history — did not dissuade Pettigrew; rather, she felt invigorated by the task. “It cannot be the easy route. It al-


ways had to be a little bit different. She thrived in that mentality,” said her best friend, Imani Gamble. “The rest of us try to find the way we can do something with the least resistance. Not her.” Winning the election was a long


shot, Pettigrew knew, but garnering the most votes was not the only victory she sought. She wanted to offer people an-


Natasha Pettigrew speaking at the Maryland Green Party Annual Assembly in Annapolis in May, above, and campaigning for Senate during the July 4 events in Annapolis, left.


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