• Former Democratic state senator in Illinois
• Former member of the U.S. Peace Council, a communist front group
• Strong supporter of the Soviet Union during the Cold War
• Former friend and political ally of Barack Obama

Born in June 1939, Alice J. Palmer is a former Democratic state senator who represented the 13th Legislative District in Illinois from 1990 to 1995. Prior to her stint in politics, she had worked for the Black Press Institute and was editor of the Black Press Review. In the 1980s she served as an executive board member of the U.S. Peace Council, which the FBI identified as a Communist front group (and which was an affiliate of the World Peace Council, an international Soviet front). Palmer participated in the World Peace Council's Prague assembly in 1983 -- just as the USSR was launching its "nuclear freeze" movement, a scheme that would have frozen Soviet nuclear and military superiority in place.

In June 1986, the Black Press Institute contributed an article, "An Afro-American Journalist on the USSR," to the Communist Party USA's newspaper People's Daily World. The article detailed how Alice Palmer had recently attended the 27th Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union and had been greatly impressed by the Soviet system. Palmer was quoted making the following statements:

• "The key word at the congress was 'acceleration.' The Soviet plan to provide people with higher wages and better education, health and transportation, while we in our country are hearing that cutbacks are necessary in all of these areas. I think that is a profound contrast."
• "We Americans can be misled by the major media. We're being told the Soviets are striving to achieve a comparatively low standard of living compared with ours, but actually they have reached a basic stability in meeting their needs and are now planning to double their production."
• In response to Western critics who claimed that the Soviet state treated its people as veritable slaves, Palmer said: "No slave labor system can enlist the confidence and enthusiasm of its workers. In fact, I know of no slave labor system that declared [as did the Soviet system] that improving the living standard of the common people was its objective, let alone one that publicly announced a plan to make such advances."
• Palmer ascribed the purported efficiency of the Soviets' most recent five-year economic and social plan, to the fact that it was based on a system of "central planning."
• "The key to their [Soviet] system is the focus on groups, not individuals. They say it is the people together -- not leading, privileged individuals -- who make the nation happen."
• Palmer said that America's white-owned press "has tended to ignore or distort the gains that have been made [by the Soviets] since [the Russian Revolution of 1917]. But in fact the Soviets are carrying out a policy to resolve the inequalities between nationalities, inequalities that they say were inherited from capitalist and czarist rule. They have a comprehensive affirmative action program, which they have stuck to religiously -- if I can use that word -- since 1917."
• Palmer marveled that all Russian citizens were guaranteed jobs matching their training and skills, free education, affordable housing, and free medical care. Because all industries were planned by a central national authority, she explained, desirable jobs in all vital industries were available throughout the country.
• Palmer said that because Soviet school curricula were similarly established at the national level, "there is no second-class 'track' system in the minority-nationality schools as there is in the inferior inner city schools in my hometown, Chicago, and elsewhere in the United States."
• "The Soviet government and people have always sides with the Africans in South Africa and Namibia against apartheid…. I saw this, too, at the Patrice Lumumba Friendship University in Moscow, where students from underdeveloped countries are trained to become engineers, doctors, nurses, teachers, agricultural specialists and skilled workers. There is no brain drain going on; the students receive a free education and then return to use their talents to build up their own countries."

In the mid-1990s, Palmer attended a number of political meetings at the Chicago-area home of her friends and ideological allies, former Weatherman terrorists Bill Ayers and his wife Bernardine Dohrn. At those gatherings, Palmer developed a friendly relationship with another attendee, a young aspiring politician named Barack Obama.

In 1995, state senator Palmer decided to pursue an opportunity to run for a higher office when Mel Reynolds, the congressman from Illinois' 2nd District, resigned from the House of Representatives amid a sexual scandal involving him and an underage campaign volunteer.

As Palmer prepared to leave the state senate, she hand-picked Barack Obama as the person she most wanted to fill her newly vacated senate seat. Toward that end, she introduced Obama to party elders and donors as her preferred successor, and helped him gather the signatures required for getting his name placed on the ballot.

But in November 1995, Jesse Jackson, Jr. defeated Palmer in a special election for Reynolds' empty congressional seat. At that point, Palmer filed to retain the Democratic nomination for the state senate seat she had encouraged Obama to pursue; that seat would be up for grabs in the November 1996 elections. She asked Obama to politely withdraw from the race and offered to help him find an alternative position elsewhere.

But Obama refused to withdraw, so Palmer resolved to run against him (and two other opponents who also had declared their candidacy) in the 1996 Democratic primary. To get her name placed on the ballot, Palmer hastily gathered the minimum number of signatures required. Obama promptly challenged the legitimacy of those signatures and charged Palmer with fraud. A subsequent investigation found that a number of the names on Palmer's signature list were technically invalid, thus she was knocked off the ballot. (Names could be eliminated from a candidate's petition for a variety of reasons. For example, if a name was printed rather than written in cursive script, it was considered invalid. Or if the person collecting the signatures was not registered to perform that task, any signatures that he or she had collected likewise were nullified.)

Obama also successfully challenged the signatures gathered by his other two opponents, and both of them were disqualified. As a result, Obama ran unopposed in the Democratic primary and won by default.

"I liked Alice Palmer a lot," Obama would later reflect. "I thought she was a good public servant. It [the process by which Obama got Palmer's name removed from the ballot] was very awkward. That part of it I wish had played out entirely differently."

In 2008 Palmer endorsed Hillary Clinton for U.S. President.