Black Women Seize Historic Election Wins Across the US

Zora Neale Hurston once wrote that “the present was an egg laid by the past that had the future inside its shell.” For Black women political leaders across the country, that future hatched during the midterm elections as a wave of Black women made history by winning competitive races and claiming a number of political firsts. 

Across the nation, milestones included the election of a new Black woman senator in Illinois, Juliana Stratton, who will join two Black women senators, marking the first time in U.S. history that three Black women will serve in the Senate at the same time. Stratton also becomes only the second Black woman to represent Illinois in the Senate, and just the sixth Black woman to serve in the Senate’s more than 200-year history.

Beyond Washington, Black women candidates in down ballot races broke centuries-old glass ceilings to secure historic firsts in state legislatures and statewide executive offices. The most resonant epicenter of this larger political sea change for Black women has unfolded most profoundly in the American South. 

Just one day before Georgia voters went to the polls to elect a new governor, former Mayor of Atlanta Keisha Lance Bottoms journeyed roughly 90 miles outside of Atlanta to her ancestral roots in Crawfordville, Georgia. As a fifth-generation Georgian whose lineage can be traced back to a Crawfordville plantation, Bottoms visited the grave of her great-great-grandmother, Betsy Peek, who was born into slavery in 1845, two decades before emancipation. 

As Bottoms stood over the gravesite of an ancestor she never met whose aspirations she pondered, there was one thing the candidate for Georgia governor was sure of; she was “standing on shoulders of steel.” From the depths of slavery, Betsy Peek likely could never have imagined that nearly two centuries later, her own great-great-granddaughter would be standing over her gravesite on the precipice of making history. 

After all, Crawfordville was also the home of the Confederate Vice President Alexander Stephens, who infamously declared just four years before Peek’s birth, that the subjugation and continued enslavement of Black people rested “upon the great truth that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery, subordination to the superior race, is his natural and moral condition.”

Stephens’ thoughts were reflective of a state and country that had gone to great lengths to keep Black women like Peek enslaved, and had denied her the right to vote, but was now poised to elect her great-great-granddaughter to its highest office. 

That possibility became reality last night when Bottoms was elected governor of Georgia, making her the first Black woman to become governor of a state in America. Bottoms neutralized a $200 million self-funded opposition to become Georgia’s first Black governor and first Black woman governor. This win also makes her the first Democrat-elected governor in Georgia since 2002, when former Democratic governor Roy Barnes lost his bid for reelection. 

Georgia is a state that has had opportunities before to elect a Black woman to governor, falling short with Stacey Abrams during her historic back-to-back runs in 2018 and 2022. Now, Governor-Elect Keisha Lance Bottoms sits at the vanguard of this shift, comprising only one piece of the seismic realignment underway in a region that has historically locked Black women out of statewide executive power. Also elected last night were Penny Brown Reynolds as Secretary of State and Tanya Miller as Attorney General, who will join her in the upper echelons of Georgia state government. Together, these three Black women represent a reshaped political landscape for Georgia, generally seen as one of the most dynamic and ascendant progressive states in the South. 

These electoral victories come as the South and Southwest regions of the U.S. experienced a dramatic partisan shift last night, with Democrats flipping three key Senate seats in North Carolina, South Carolina, and Texas. These massive partisan swings delivered a glaring denouncement of President Trump and Republican policies that had only worsened the vulnerabilities and deepened the economic crises the region had been experiencing for decades. 

Poverty rates in the South have been consistently higher than those in other regions of the United States, and at 18%, the South has the highest child poverty rate in the country. Black children in the region experience an astounding poverty rate of 30.1%, nearly triple the poverty rate of white children. 

Southern states like Georgia have notoriously refused to expand Medicaid coverage, forcing millions into a severe coverage gap and accelerating a crisis of rural hospital closures. 

Furthermore, in the past two decades, globalization has shuttered much of the manufacturing industries in large swaths of rural areas across the South, plunging them into economic crises. One in five workers in the South aren’t making minimum wage. 

Data centers have started moving in and wreaking havoc on local communities, raising electricity costs for residents and creating significant environmental pollution that presents severe health risks to already vulnerable families.

As Governor, Bottoms will be tasked with following through on her campaign promises to turn some of these challenges around for Georgia residents. During her run for governor, she vowed that, if elected, she would pave the way for local municipalities to cut taxes on groceries and other household goods to help dull rising costs, eliminate the state income tax for public school teachers, expand Medicaid coverage, raise the minimum wage, and pause the construction of the massive growth of data centers. 

Studies show that Black women political leaders excel at “relational politics,” a style of governance rooted in building cross-coalition trust and collaborative problem-solving that is uniquely suited to pushing past legislative gridlock. It’s a proclivity that positions Bottoms to use that distinct ability to effectively bridge political divides and deliver the targeted relief she promised during her campaign to Georgia’s most vulnerable communities. 

More broadly, the electoral victories of Black women in this year’s midterm elections represent a powerful reclamation of agency in the face of a corporate America that has actively dismantled diversity, equity, and inclusion programs and pushed Black women out of the workplace at historic rates. Where corporate America increasingly falters in recognizing and rewarding the brilliance of Black women in the workplace, the ballot box is now emerging as one definitive arena for Black women to assert their leadership and rewrite the rules of political power in ways that deliver change directly to Black communities.

As exciting and inspirational as these strides are for Black women everywhere, we know from history that with great political and electoral progress, often comes the threat of a new wave of electoral and political tactics to reverse and add new restrictions. Additional wins for Democratic candidates in areas Republicans introduced gerrymandering to either retain Republican control or flip seats in their favor largely failed. 

The steep headwinds of systemic pushback and the threat of legislative gridlock remain formidable obstacles for these newly elected officials as they prepare to govern. The very resilience that provides a steady beacon of hope that structural change is possible poses a direct threat to the systems that were designed to keep them out of office. 

For now, it’s important to revel in these victories as they are poignant reminders of the future that Hurston envisioned of a future hatching from the shell of the past. In Georgia, Yolanda Renee King, the 18-year-old only grandchild of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., added to Hurston’s lineage of progress when she stepped into a voting booth yesterday to vote for the first time. Her grandfather’s dream, in some ways, included this moment: that his granddaughter would enjoy the very right to vote he fought so hard for, on a ballot blooming with a rich selection of Black women who possessed the enduring strength and brilliance he always knew existed, to lead the very state he called home.

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