Her 2018 run for a congressional seat was documented in Netflix’s ”Knock Down the House“
Cori Bush, a Democratic congressional candidate for Missouri’s first district, was in a negative place in her life — struggling to pay bills with her minimum-wage job, putting in 40-50 hour weeks and still worrying when her next meal would come — when she realized she had to do something for her community.
“All of those things really affected me. But I started to realize this is not just happening to me. So how can I be selfish and work for myself without thinking about others?” Cori Bush said at TheWrap’s Power Women Summit. “It was like, I can’t just work on what’s happening in my house. What about someone else’s?”
This revelation crystallized further when protests emerged in nearby Ferguson, Missouri, following the fatal shooting of Michael Brown at the hands of a police officer. “I couldn’t turn my back,” Cori Bush told Sophia Bush, the actress and activist, at the summit. “I had to stay with my people.”
Her passion for and intimate knowledge with the problems facing her community eventually led Cori Bush to a 2018 run for a congressional seat — a race that was documented in Netflix’s “Knock Down the House.” Though Bush lost in the Democratic primary to incumbent Rep. William Lacy Clay, she is back on the campaign trail once more.
“There is this disconnect between government and the people being governed,” Sophia Bush, who hosts the “Work in Progress” podcast, said.
Bush then pointed to how being a survivor of sexual assault gave her a deeper understanding of the ways in which the system could be changed and improved.
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J. Clara Chan
Media and politics reporter • jclara.chan@thewrap.com • Twitter: @jclarachan