Jarvis Stewart

People and Principals

Jarvis will never forget the first time he arrived in the District in the summer of 1989. He was 19 and had just driven cross-country from Houston where he worked for three months to buy a junker good enough to make the trip. He remembers crossing the 15th Street bridge at 2 am. The city was quiet, the monuments lit up and majestic.

He was arriving to work for the late, great Ron Brown who had become the first Black Chairman of the Democratic National Committee. In a news article, Mr. Brown said that he wanted to be a kingmaker but not a king. That resonated with Jarvis, who also wanted to be the person behind the scenes, getting others elected to office. Jarvis wrote a long-shot letter to Mr. Brown during his junior year at Prairie View A&M. To his surprise, Mr. Brown responded to his letter with a handwritten note and an internship offer.

He would go on to build a career based on relationships and deeply held principles around economic equity and organizational strategy.

The youngest of five, he couldn’t have been more different from his siblings. They were artistic, musical and excelled at hard sciences, graduating at the top of their class. He tended toward athletics and political science. He won no academic awards, but he had the people skills to hang a career on.

His mom gave him foundational principles. She was no-nonsense and kept her kids on the straight and narrow. The family had little money, but an immense sense of purpose and place. There was church every Sunday. It was “yes, ma’am” or “yes, sir” to every adult. She was also a fearless community organizer. She helped the elderly access benefits and organized food giveaways for the needy. She demanded there be better books at their local school. She taught her kids to plant seeds for trees for which you may never enjoy the shade.

While interning at the DNC, he had met fellow intern Harold Ford who would become his best friend. Some years later, they joined forces and Jarvis settled into the kingmaker position.

But in between, he spent a few years in his twenties in Los Angeles where he worked as a political and campaign strategist and in the music entertainment industry. He was there for the Rodney King riots and watched neighborhoods burn. He wanted to use his relationships to help rebuild, but also felt a pull to head back to the District where he could have a larger positive impact. He took a job in the second Clinton Administration in the Department of Labor.

For a people person, the bureaucratic work wasn’t quite the right fit. When his friend Harold, by then a congressman, called him up to offer him the top job in his office as Chief of Staff, Jarvis couldn’t say no.

After penning the Ron Brown letter, it was the second-best professional decision he ever made. At 26, Harold as one of the youngest members of Congress in history, and Jarvis was just a year older. Together they were a formidable force, representing the next generation in Democratic politics.

By his early 30s, the kingmaker was ready to launch his own enterprise. But he still wasn’t taking center stage. He started a government relations firm, pulling together threads of his career—understanding people, respecting the process, understanding the power of policy and unwavering loyalty to principles.

Much of his work is guiding clients through the fixed guideposts of policymaking. The elected officials come and go, but the rules stay in place. How does a bill become law? How is it drafted, reviewed and implemented? Then figure out who sits at each inflection point in the process. It goes back to the way he was raised.

His mom took the time to figure out how the city council and school board worked. She learned how oversight could be leveraged over the school’s principal who was too slow to get books to a school serving low-income Black kids. He, too, would do his part to elevate the promises of inclusion and equal justice for all.

His proudest achievement was leading the team that pushed through legislation to build the MLK, Jr. Memorial. Dr. King is the only non-president and man of peace honored on the National Mall. Jarvis notes that “we now have a king between two presidents.” Fittingly, Jarvis helped give him the most prominent of stages.