MARIETTA, Ga. — The little girl ran up to her, wide-eyed and giddy.Davis was stunned. A former kindergarten teacher and librarian, she was more accustomed to shuttling her two sons to basketball practice than being seen as a local celebrity. But now she had been elected the only Black woman on the Cobb County School Board, gaining office in a once conservative suburban community where people who look like her rarely held positions of power.
Now Black women are mobilized and demanding an overdue return on their investment. Over the last several years and across America, Black women ran and won elections in historic numbers, from Congress to county school boards. When Stacey Abrams, a Black progressive Democrat, ran for governor in 2018, she focused her campaign on women of color. In that election, more than 51,000 Black women in Cobb County cast ballots — 20,000 more than voted in midterm elections four year earlier.
Across the county, there was soul searching over how Clinton lost white, working-class voters, but much less on why Democrats also lost some of the support of this core constituency. “We have never been at this moment,” said Aimee Allison, who in 2018 founded the network She the People, which is working to turn out a million women of color across seven battleground states. “For us as a group to recognize our own political power means that we also are demanding to govern.”
Black women can meet this moment in a way no one else can, they say: The world watched the video of George Floyd begging for his mother has he was dying under a police officer’s knee.When she looks at her own sons, she sees her babies. But the older boy is now taller than she is. He likes hoodies. She worries a stranger might see him as a menace, not a boy whose mother still has to remind him to floss his teeth.
Only occasionally did their work lead to elective office, as it did when Shirley Chisholm became the first Black woman elected to Congress, in 1968, and a candidate for president in 1972. “I said for years, ‘Maybe one day they’ll be ready for me,’” Hill said. “And as exciting as it is to be the first, it’s a little unbelievable that we’re having a conversation about being the first in the year 2020.”
“People told us that education is key to being successful,” Brown said. “What did Black women do? Black women, out of any constituency group in this country, we enter college more than any other group in this country. Then why does the wealth not reflect that?”
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