Look Who's Holding the Gavels

— A WEEKLY NOTE FROM LEAH DAUGHTRY —

Black

Lady

News

What matters this week.
For the women who move the world.

Issue No. 006

Friday, June 5, 2026

A NOTE FROM LEAH

Last week, I took you into the rooms where decisions get made — the Court, the committee, the legislatures redrawing the maps. This week, the Court made another one. On Monday, the Supreme Court cleared the way for Alabama to use a congressional map with a single majority-Black district, setting aside the lower-court rulings that had called those maps racially discriminatory. It is the same logic we watched in Callais, now doing its work in a second Deep South state — and Louisiana made it three this same stretch. We track all of it below.

I also want to take you into a different kind of room this week — and I need you to see that it is not a different subject. The kind with folding chairs and a coffee urn in the corner. The kind where a contract gets argued line by line. The kind where worker power actually gets built.

Because this Sunday, the house of labor gathers. The AFL-CIO holds its 30th convention in Minneapolis, June 7 through 10 — the once-every-four-years meeting where the federation sets its direction. And when I look at who is standing at the front of the American labor movement right now, I see us.

Hold these two rooms together, because they are one room. In one, the Court is narrowing who gets to vote. In the other, workers are organizing to decide who gets to bargain. Voting power and economic power have never been separate fights — I said as much a few weeks ago, and Alabama just proved it again. Strip a community's vote and you weaken its hand at the table. Build its union and you build the muscle that defends the vote.

I come from a tradition that has never separated the dignity of the soul from the dignity of the labor. In the Black church, we have always known that the woman cleaning the sanctuary and the woman preaching from the pulpit are doing kindred work, and that both deserve to be paid, protected, and respected. A. Philip Randolph understood that better than anyone — he organized the Pullman porters and called the March on Washington, because he never believed they were two different causes. So this week's letter is, in its way, a church letter too.

The Headline names four women who lead, or shape, the institutions of organized labor. The Profile goes deep on one of them. The Win is a congresswoman who took the administration to court over a national monument — and won. And in The Five, we keep tracking what we promised to track.

Call them by their names. Forward it to your group chat. Pull a stat for your next meeting.

Let's get into it.

THE HEADLINE

When the house of labor gathers, look who's holding the gavels

On Sunday, June 7, the AFL-CIO opens its 30th constitutional convention in Minneapolis — the federation's highest governing body, which meets every four years to elect officers and set the direction of the American labor movement. It runs through June 10. Most of the country will not notice. We should.

Because the people standing at the front of organized labor in 2026 — the ones holding gavels, leading negotiations, and setting agendas — are increasingly Black women. Not as a symbol. As a fact of who runs the place now. Let me introduce you to four of them.

The names to know

Roxanne Brown was sworn in on March 1 as the 10th International President of the United Steelworkers — the first woman and the first person of color to lead the union since it was founded in 1942. The USW is North America's largest industrial union. That she now leads it is the kind of story that deserves its own space, so I've given it the Profile below.

April Verrett is the reason this particular convention carries extra weight. She is president of the Service Employees International Union — the roughly two-million-member powerhouse of health care, home care, property service, and public workers — and the first Black president in SEIU's history. SEIU left the AFL-CIO in 2005, in a painful split that pulled the country's most dynamic service-sector union out of the federation for nearly twenty years. Under Verrett, that ended: SEIU rejoined, and she took a seat as an AFL-CIO vice president. When the gavel falls Sunday, two million care workers, janitors, and fast-food organizers are back inside the house of labor because a Black woman brought them home. The granddaughter of an SEIU shop steward, no less.

Clayola Brown — no relation to Roxanne — is the president of the A. Philip Randolph Institute, the AFL-CIO's constituency group for Black trade unionists, a role she has held since 2004 as the first woman to do so. She also serves as the federation's civil, human, and women's rights director. She is, quite literally, the living bridge between this convention and the one that started it all. As a teenager, she saved her babysitting money for a Greyhound ticket to the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom — the march Randolph called and Bayard Rustin organized — and climbed a tree on the National Mall to hear Dr. King.

Becky Pringle leads the National Education Association — the largest labor union in the United States, with some three million members. A note for precision, because it matters: the NEA is not an AFL-CIO affiliate. It is independent, chartered by Congress in 1906, and it sits outside the federation entirely. Which is exactly the point. The single biggest union in the country, the one that isn't even in the room in Minneapolis, is also led by a Black woman. A former middle-school science teacher, Pringle is in the final year of her presidency.

One more name, behind the scenes

The four women above hold titles you can see. Julie Greene Collier holds one you mostly don't: Chief of Staff of the AFL-CIO, the person responsible for aligning the federation's agenda and running its operations day to day. She came up through the federation's political and mobilization machine — the grassroots engine that registers voters and turns them out. Which is the quiet point of this whole issue: the women leading labor aren't only the ones at the podium. They're the ones holding the building together so the podium has something to stand on.

The lineage to name

None of this fell from the sky. The Black labor tradition in this country runs straight back through Randolph and the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters — the first Black union to win a contract with a major American corporation — and through the domestic workers, laundry workers, and care workers, most of them Black women, who organized for a century with no titles and no microphones. The gavels these women hold now were forged in those rooms.

The labor movement did not hand Black women these gavels.
They organized their way to the head of the table.
Now they get to set the agenda.

Why it's Black women

This is not an accident of personality. Black women have long carried among the highest union membership rates of any group of women in America — concentrated in exactly the sectors organized labor has grown into: public service, health care, education, and home care. When you build power where Black women already work, you build power with Black women. The leadership we are watching emerge is the harvest of that math.

And it lands at a hard moment. The administration has proposed cutting the Labor Department's budget by roughly a quarter. Federal labor protections are being rolled back. Public-sector bargaining rights are under attack in statehouse after statehouse. The women named above are not inheriting a calm institution. They are inheriting a fight.

WHY THIS MATTERS FOR US

A union card is one of the most reliable tools Black women have ever had for closing the wage gap. Union jobs pay more, are harder to fire you from, and come with the kind of benefits that turn a paycheck into stability. When Issue 002 said Black women's earnings are the floor, this is part of how that floor gets held. Black women leading these institutions means Black women shaping where the movement organizes next, which contracts get prioritized, and whose work gets called skilled. That is not symbolic power. That is the power to decide.

READ MORE. AFL-CIO convention · USW on Roxanne Brown · SEIU · NEA leadership.

THE PROFILE

A Black woman leads the Steelworkers now. Her name is Roxanne Brown.

Roxanne Brown, International President, United Steelworkers. (Photo: USW)

If the Headline is the room, Roxanne Brown is the woman holding the pen at the most male-coded table in it.

WHO  Roxanne Brown

WHAT  10th International President, United Steelworkers (USW)

SINCE  Sworn in March 1, 2026

FIRST  First woman and first person of color to lead the USW

Think of the United Steelworkers and you probably picture a hard hat, a blast furnace, a man. The USW is North America's largest industrial union, with members across steel, oil, paper, mining, rubber, and manufacturing — the muscle of the old industrial economy. From its founding in 1942 until this year, every person who led it was a man. As of March 1, the person holding the gavel is a Black woman.

The path

Brown was born in Jamaica and raised in White Plains, New York. She has been a member of the Steelworkers for 27 years, rising through the union as its chief policy and political strategist — the person who shaped where the USW put its weight in Washington, on trade, on manufacturing, on the laws that decide whether American industrial jobs survive. She served for years as an International Vice President at Large before her election to the top job. She also sits on the AFL-CIO's Executive Council and chairs its Industrial Union Council, which means that when the labor federation talks industrial policy, Roxanne Brown is at the center of the conversation.

Why the room matters

Industrial unions have not always been a welcoming place for Black workers, much less Black women — the history of American manufacturing labor includes plenty of locals that fought to keep them out. So a Black woman leading the Steelworkers is not just a milestone of representation. It is a turn in a story that started with exclusion. She now leads negotiations over the wages and safety of hundreds of thousands of workers, runs the union's political operation, and will help steer the AFL-CIO's response to an administration cutting the very agencies that protect industrial workers.

WHY THIS MATTERS FOR US — ESPECIALLY THIS WEEK

Industrial jobs built the Black middle class — the Great Migration was, in large part, a march toward union manufacturing work that paid enough to buy a house and send a child to college. Those jobs have been disappearing for decades, and the trade and industrial policy that decides their fate is technical, male, and easy to tune out. The woman now setting the Steelworkers' position on all of it is one of us. When she sits across from a company, or testifies before Congress, the question of which jobs are worth saving runs through her. That is the kind of power that does not make headlines — and changes lives.

THE FIVE

Five things to know this week.

TRACKING CALLAIS · TWO SEATS IN ONE WEEK

The Deep South damage report

A month after the Court gutted Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act in Callais, two majority-Black congressional seats fell in the same stretch of days.

Louisiana. Gov. Jeff Landry signed a new congressional map on Friday that dismantles Rep. Cleo Fields's majority-Black district — redrawn around majority-white communities and now likely to flip Republican — while keeping Rep. Troy Carter's New Orleans seat. The delegation moves from 4–2 to 5–1 Republican. The ACLU of Louisiana signaled it may sue; so, from the other direction, may the Callais plaintiffs, who wanted no majority-Black seat at all. The primary is now an open one on November 3.

Alabama. On Monday, in an unsigned order over the dissents of the three liberal justices, the Supreme Court set aside the lower-court rulings — which had found Alabama's 2023 map intentionally racially discriminatory — and cleared the way for the state to use a map with a single majority-Black district instead of two. Justice Sotomayor wrote that the Court had "doubled down on chaos." This is an emergency-posture order, not a final ruling on the merits. The fight returns to the lower court.

The work continues. So does the litigation — and the pressure on the John R. Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act, still stalled in the Senate.

01  The Spelman Seven.

Spelman College named seven valedictorians in its Class of 2026 — each with a perfect 4.0, the most in the school's history. The group has already earned its own name: the Spelman Seven. They crossed the stage together at the 139th commencement, where Symone Sanders Townsend gave the keynote. Call them by their names: Nia-Sarai Perry, Aiyana Ringo, Alyssa Richardson, Cori'Anna White, Sophia Davis, Mariama Diallo, and Alexis Renae Sims.

Spelman College · The 19th

02  Labor's leadership turns over this summer.

Two of the country's biggest unions change hands at once. Lee Saunders — the first Black president of AFSCME, the 1.4-million-member public-service union — retires at the August convention, alongside Secretary-Treasurer Elissa McBride. And Becky Pringle finishes her final term atop the NEA; its Representative Assembly elects her successor in July, with current vice president Princess Moss, a Virginia educator, the front-runner from leadership in a contested field. Watch who gets handed these microphones.

AFSCME · NEA

03  LaMonica McIver, and the facility at the center of it.

The New Jersey congresswoman — prosecuted over a 2025 oversight visit to the Delaney Hall ICE detention center and facing up to 17 years — goes before the Third Circuit in Wilmington on June 23 to argue that the Speech or Debate Clause shields her. She is now seventeen weeks pregnant, and twenty former members of Congress, seventeen of them Republicans, have urged the court to dismiss. The facility itself is now under siege: after detainees began a hunger strike over conditions, House Democratic Leader Hakeem Jeffries visited with McIver and reported conditions that, he said, shock the conscience — and both the city of Newark and the State of New Jersey have sued its operator, GEO Group, the city seeking to shut it down. The prosecution and the conditions are one story: the accusation, regardless of merit, is meant to be the punishment.

New Jersey Globe · CNN · NBC News

04  The Labor Department is on the chopping block.

As the labor movement prepares to convene, the administration has proposed cutting the U.S. Department of Labor's budget by roughly 26 percent — the agency that enforces wage law, workplace safety, and the right to organize. A bipartisan group of senators has signaled it will reject the cut. The fight over how much it costs to protect a worker is, this year, a live one.

OnLabor

05  Karen Bass is forced into a runoff.

Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass — the first woman and second Black mayor of the nation's second-largest city — advanced out of Tuesday's primary but fell short of an outright majority, making her the first L.A. mayor in more than twenty years headed to a November runoff. She led the field with roughly 36 percent; her eventual opponent, still being decided as ballots are counted, will come from a Republican reality-TV challenger and a councilmember running to her left. Bass's standing has been dogged by the 2025 Palisades wildfire and a billion-dollar budget gap — but she held commanding support among Black voters. The hold on big-city executive power is real, and fragile.

Associated Press · KTLA

THE WIN

The name comes down.

Some weeks the Win is a gavel. This week, it is a court order — and a Black congresswoman who refused to let a President carve his name into a national memorial.

On Friday, Rep. Joyce Beatty (D-OH) won her lawsuit against the Kennedy Center. A federal judge ruled what she had argued all along: Congress created and named the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts by statute, and only Congress can rename it. The "Trump-Kennedy Center" signage that went up in December must come off the building within two weeks. The judge also restored the voting rights the board had stripped from Beatty as an ex-officio trustee, and blocked — for now — the two-year closure the administration had announced, which would have gone dark this July.

Three things she asked for. Three things she got. The name, the vote, the doors.

The Center has signaled it will appeal, so this may not be the last word, and the name could linger on the facade while that plays out. But the ruling is unambiguous, and so was Beatty: the Center, she said, belongs to the American people, not to Donald Trump.

In a season when so much is being taken — seats, maps, protections — here is something taken back. And it happened the same month the country marks Black Music Month, on the steps of the building meant to hold that music. They tried to close the nation's stage. A Black woman from Ohio kept the lights on.

THE WATCH

What we are watching next.

Dates worth circling. The first one is today.

Today, Fri, June 5, 8:30 a.m. ET: The Bureau of Labor Statistics releases the May jobs report — about ninety minutes after this lands in your inbox. Watch the Black women's unemployment stats. We are devoting next week's issue to it.

Sun–Wed, June 7–10: The AFL-CIO's 30th constitutional convention, Minneapolis. The women in this issue's Headline will be in the room.

Tue, June 16: Georgia's Republican gubernatorial runoff decides who faces Keisha Lance Bottoms, the Democratic nominee, in November.

Fri, June 19: Juneteenth — and it falls on a publishing day. We'll mark it.

Mon, June 23: LaMonica McIver's appeal is argued before the Third Circuit in Wilmington.

Before the recess: The Supreme Court is expected to rule any week now in Trump v. Barbara, the challenge to the executive order denying citizenship to U.S.-born children of parents without permanent status. The 14th Amendment was written for us — ratified in 1868 to guarantee citizenship to the formerly enslaved and bury Dred Scott — so any reading that narrows it reaches the same clause that made Black citizenship constitutional. At April's argument, several justices sounded skeptical of the government's theory. A read is not a ruling. When it lands, we'll give it the full treatment.

BLACK MUSIC MONTH · WEEK ONE

June is Black Music Month, so we'll close each issue this month with something to listen to. To start: Jill Scott is back. To Whom This May Concern is her first album in eleven years, and her tour's North American leg opens this week, June 4, in Nashville — fitting, in a month when someone tried to shutter the nation's concert hall. And keep an ear on Kelela, whose new single "Point Blank" arrived June 1 ahead of her album this summer.

Both on all major streaming platforms.

Ongoing: The state-by-state redistricting cascade after Callais, and the John R. Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act. Still moving. Still stalled. Still needed.

ONE THING TO WATCH

For your weekend.

This week's recommendation is the documentary "Love, Joy & Power: Tools for Liberation," which premiered Monday, June 1.

Directed by Daresha Kyi, the film follows the founders of Black Voters Matter — LaTosha Brown, Cliff Albright, and April England Albright — through their organizing in the rural South, their role in the elections that reshaped Georgia, and the threats they faced for the work. It is less a record of the past than a field manual for the present.

I am recommending it as the companion to this whole issue. Everything above — the maps being redrawn, the unions being led, the seats being defended — comes down to the same question this film asks: how do ordinary people build and keep power when the rules are being rewritten against them? The women in these pages are answering it. So is this film.

Watch: If you missed Monday's premiere on The Joy Reid Show and Roland Martin Unfiltered, find viewing details at bvmdoc.com.

Stay rooted.

— LD

Black Lady News is a weekly curation by Leah Daughtry.
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Black Lady News · Issue 006 · June 2026

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