Black Lady News

— A WEEKLY NOTE FROM LEAH DAUGHTRY —

Black

Lady

News

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

One good month is not a recovery.

Issue No. 007

Friday, June 12, 2026

A NOTE FROM LEAH

The jobs report came out last Friday, and if you only read the top line, you would think things were looking up. The national rate held steady. And the unemployment rate for Black women actually went down — from 6.9 percent to 6 percent in a single month.

I want to be honest with you, because that is the whole job here. A number can go down for a good reason or a bad one. It goes down when people find work. It also goes down when people stop looking — when the searching itself has worn them out, and the count simply stops seeing them. One month is not a trend. And a year of being pushed out of the federal workforce, out of the jobs that built the Black middle class, does not reverse itself because a single Friday brought a softer number.

In Issue 002, on Mother's Day weekend, I told you that Black women's earnings are not supplemental — they are the floor. This week is about who is still standing on that floor, who has been pushed off it, and the women in Congress who are refusing to let the rest of us look away.

We are also profiling a woman eleven days from a primary that could make New York history, naming the pattern of Black congresswomen being dragged through court, and ending — as we always do — somewhere that gives the heart a reason. A teenager from Washington State put Black hair on the front page of Google this month, and called it a crown. Wait until you see it.

Forward it to your group chat. Pull a stat for your next meeting.

Let's get into it.

THE HEADLINE

The good number that isn't: what last week's jobs report doesn't tell you about Black women

On Friday, June 5, the Bureau of Labor Statistics released the May jobs report. The national unemployment rate held at 4.3 percent. The Black unemployment rate was 6.6 percent — still the highest of any major group, against 3.8 percent for white workers. And for Black women specifically, the rate fell, from 6.9 percent in April to 6 percent in May.

That last number looks like good news. Read it slowly anyway. An unemployment rate counts only people who are out of work and still looking. It falls when people find jobs — and it also falls when people give up looking and quietly drop out of the count. The headline cannot tell a recovery from a retreat. You have to go looking for that yourself.

So we went looking. Over the past year, the Economic Policy Institute found, Black women's annual unemployment rose from 5.8 to 6.7 percent — even as their labor force participation fell, from 60.6 to 59.7 percent. People leaving the labor force is exactly what pulls a monthly rate down while nothing improves. And the hardest hit were not who you would guess: college-educated Black women saw the steepest employment decline of any education level, and EPI concluded the year's net loss was driven entirely by public-sector cuts.

A rate that falls because women stopped looking for work is not a recovery. It is a disappearance, dressed up as one.

Where the floor gave way: the federal workforce

For generations, federal employment was one of the surest ladders into the Black middle class — stable, unionized, better-paying and more equitable than the private sector. Black women built careers there precisely because the discrimination was a little less ruthless. That ladder has been kicked out. According to an analysis published by The American Prospect, Black women lost 95,371 federal government jobs in 2025 — about a third of the entire federal contraction, in a workforce where they make up roughly 12 percent of employees, nearly double their share of the labor force overall. The agencies cut hardest were the ones with the most women and the most workers of color. This was not a side effect. It was a design.

Why there was nowhere to fall

Here is what the monthly number can never show you. When Black women lose ground in one sector, the labor market does not let them spread across the rest of it. A December 2024 data brief from the National Employment Law Project found Black women crowded into a narrow band of undervalued work — nowhere more than health care, where they are about 13 percent of the workforce, double their share of the labor force. Ninety-two percent of them work in jobs where they are overrepresented, many in home care: low pay, thin benefits, frequent labor violations.

And before anyone reaches for the old answer — just get more education — the brief closes that door. More than 91 percent of Black women with a bachelor's, and 72 percent of those with a graduate degree, still work in occupations where Black women are overrepresented. The crowding follows them up the credential ladder, which is why the wage gap holds at every level: on average, Black women in health care earn 58.6 cents to a white man's dollar, 74 cents to a white woman's. When you are concentrated into a corner of the economy on purpose, a downturn gives you no room to land. It gives you a shorter fall.

Black women's earnings are not supplemental.
They are the floor.
And the floor keeps getting pulled.

The women who refuse to let it pass quietly

The Congressional Caucus on Black Women and Girls has been sounding this alarm for months. Its three co-chairs — Reps. Yvette Clarke (NY-09), Robin Kelly (IL-02), and Bonnie Watson Coleman (NJ-12) — together with Rep. Ayanna Pressley (MA-07), led 19 colleagues in a December letter demanding the Department of Labor act on the crisis. Pressley has gone further, pressing the Federal Reserve directly on its mandate to pursue maximum employment.

And there is a quieter fight that goes to the heart of this issue: whether we get to keep seeing these numbers at all. When a group's monthly rate can swing a full point in either direction, the trend lives in the racial and gender breakdowns, not the headline — and an administration that has already fired the people who produce numbers it dislikes has every reason to let the fog roll in. There is a bill in Congress built to protect exactly those breakdowns; you will find it in our Five. The breakdown is how we keep seeing Black women at all.

WHY THIS MATTERS FOR US

Because the number you are handed is not the number that tells the truth, and the people handing it to you are counting on you to stop reading at the top line. A softer month is not permission to look away. The federal jobs are still gone. The crowding is still there, degree or no degree. The wage gap still holds at every rung. What changed in May was the optics, not the architecture — and the women in Congress fighting to keep that architecture visible are doing it precisely so that a good Friday can never again be mistaken for a recovery. Watch the breakdowns. Watch who is still looking. And watch what happens to the data itself.

READ MORE. BLS May report · Joint Center · EPI · The American Prospect · NELP.

THE PROFILE

Eleven days out: Adrienne Adams and a ballot line that could make New York history

If the Headline is what it looks like when Black women are pushed out of power, the Profile is what it looks like when one of us runs straight at it.

Adrienne E. Adams.

WHO Adrienne E. Adams

WHAT Candidate for Lieutenant Governor of New York

WHEN Democratic primary, Tuesday, June 23

STAKES First all-woman major-party slate for governor and LG in NY history

In February, Gov. Kathy Hochul named Adrienne Adams as her running mate, launching the first all-woman slate to campaign for New York State's two top offices. The pairing also closed a long-running rupture: Hochul's sitting lieutenant governor, Antonio Delgado, had spent months mounting a primary challenge against her before suspending his gubernatorial campaign in February, saying there was simply no path forward.

But in New York, governor and lieutenant governor run on separate primary lines — so Adams has to win her own contest on June 23 to lock the second spot on Hochul's general-election ticket. Eleven days after you read this, the voters decide. We are introducing her now, before the result, on purpose: the woman matters more than the outcome.

The path

Adams is from southeast Queens — Hollis, specifically — and represented parts of the borough on the City Council before her colleagues elected her the Council's first Black Speaker in 2022. A Spelman graduate, she ran for mayor last year in the crowded field that ultimately elected Zohran Mamdani, and did not break through. The Speaker's gavel is where she made her mark: steering the city's budget, sparring with the mayor's office over housing and over how much power that office should hold.

Why Hochul wanted her

The political logic is its own story. Hochul, an upstate moderate, recruited Adams in part to shore up support among working-class Black voters in New York City — the very voters this issue's Headline is about. It is worth naming plainly: a Black woman is being asked to be the bridge to Black voters on a ticket pitched around the cost of living, child care, and the economic squeeze on working families. That is real power and real usefulness in the same breath, and the interesting question for the next year is which one Adams chooses to lead with.

WHY THIS MATTERS FOR US

If Adams wins the primary and the ticket prevails in November, she would be the first Black woman to serve as Lieutenant Governor of New York, on the first all-woman major-party slate in the state's history. In a year when Black women are being pushed out of public-sector jobs and the courts are narrowing Black political power state by state, a Black woman one rung from the governorship of the fourth-largest state is not a symbol. It is a position — with a budget, a bully pulpit, and a vote that breaks ties in the State Senate. We will be watching June 23.

THE FIVE

Five things to know this week.

THE THROUGH-LINE · THE PATTERN, CONTINUED

They pay the accused, and prosecute the women.

The harassment beat we have tracked since Issue 002 keeps moving. LaMonica McIver, the New Jersey congresswoman charged after an oversight visit to a Newark ICE facility — an incident where co-chair Bonnie Watson Coleman stood beside her — takes her case to the Third Circuit on June 23. She faces up to 17 years; January 6 defendants who did far worse were pardoned. Letitia James, Fani Willis, and Lisa Cook — the first Black woman on the Federal Reserve Board — remain in the administration's sights.

Set against that: the so-called Anti-Weaponization Fund, a roughly $1.8 billion pot born of a Trump settlement to pay people who claim the government was "weaponized" against them — a category that includes January 6 figures. A federal judge froze it; a hearing is set for our publish date, June 12. The administration now says the fund is dead. The contrast remains: money for the accused, indictments for the women who held the line.

One note of forward motion: Rep. Summer Lee (PA-12) — co-author of the Better Labor Statistics Act in our Five — announced this week that she is joining the House Judiciary Committee, the panel with direct oversight of the Justice Department at the center of this pattern. A Black woman moving into the room where this gets fought.

We are watching this. So should you.

01 A bill to keep the jobs numbers honest.

Reps. Ayanna Pressley (MA-07) and Summer Lee (PA-12) introduced the Better Labor Statistics Act in March, on the anniversary of the Labor Department's founding. It would codify into law that the BLS publish the jobs report monthly, on the first Friday, broken down by race, gender, geography, and industry — protections against an administration that has shown it will retaliate over data it dislikes. The bill is endorsed by the AFL-CIO.

Rep. Pressley · Rep. Summer Lee

02 The credential paradox.

The single most important finding in this week's data, worth its own line: over the past year, college-educated Black women lost more ground than any other education group. The bachelor's degree that was supposed to be insurance turned out to be no shield against a federal-sector purge that hit exactly where educated Black women had built stable careers. The lesson is not that education failed. It is that discrimination does not check your diploma.

Economic Policy Institute

03 Two unions are about to change hands.

Labor leadership is in motion this summer. At AFSCME — one of the largest public-sector unions, with deep Black women membership — President Lee Saunders is departing in August, opening a succession fight. At the National Education Association, President Becky Pringle is in her final term, with the Representative Assembly meeting in July. Who leads these unions shapes who fights for the public-sector jobs Black women rely on. We are tracking both.

AFSCME · NEA

04 The home-care workforce is the next frontier.

As the population ages, home care is among the fastest-growing job categories in the country — and almost a third of Black women in health care already work in it, often for poverty wages with few protections. Every conversation about "good jobs" that skips home care skips Black women. If you want a single policy fight to follow this year, follow this one: whether the jobs growing fastest are made livable, or left exactly as they are.

NELP · BLS projections

05 Black Music Month, Week 2: the freedom songs.

In a week about labor and justice, the music register turns to protest. Our anchor is Nina Simone's "Backlash Blues" — her 1967 setting of a Langston Hughes poem, one of his last, about who carries the country's burdens and who profits, which is to say, a song about exactly what the Headline is about. Two more in the tradition: the Staple Singers' "Freedom Highway," written for the 1965 march from Selma and sung by a young Mavis Staples, now the last living member of the group; and a present-day carrier of the line in Rhiannon Giddens' "At the Purchaser's Option," built from an 1830s advertisement selling an enslaved woman, her child offered "at the purchaser's option." Fittingly, Giddens titled her own album Freedom Highway and closed it with the Staples' song. Three generations, one insistence: name the cost, and sing anyway.

Listen via the official releases: Nina Simone, Nina Simone Sings the Blues (RCA) · the Staple Singers, Freedom Highway (Epic/Legacy) · Rhiannon Giddens, Freedom Highway (Nonesuch)

THE WIN

A crown on the front page of Google.

Some weeks the Win is a verdict. This week it is a drawing — and the millions of people who opened a search engine on June 4 and found it waiting for them.

"Hair Power: The Crown that Grows from Us," by Kameirah Johnson.

Kameirah Johnson, an 18-year-old senior at Lakeside School in the Seattle area, is the national winner of the 2026 Doodle for Google contest. Her artwork beat tens of thousands of K–12 submissions and ran on Google's homepage for the world to see. The prompt was "My superpower is…." Her answer was her hair.

The piece is titled "Hair Power: The Crown that Grows from Us." It shows Kameirah lying in the grass alongside her mother, Simone, and her sister, Kalieyah, their hair styled into crowns — coils and curls and braids reaching out as something regal, rooted, and shared. In her artist statement, she described her hair as holding culture and care "passed down without words," and called it, simply, undeniably beautiful. The prize: a $55,000 college scholarship and a $50,000 technology package for her school.

There is a detail that belongs in this issue. In the fall, Kameirah heads to NYU — her dream school since she was 11 — to study economics and studio arts, with an eye toward where art and business meet. She wants to own a gallery one day. A young Black woman walking deliberately toward the economy, on her own terms, the same week our Headline counted how many of us were pushed out of it.

Three generations of Black women, lying in the grass, wearing their hair like the inheritance it is. She did not ask the country's permission to call it a crown. She just drew it that way, and the whole world had to look.

THE WATCH

What we are watching next.

Five dates worth circling. The first one is today.

Today, Fri, June 12: A federal judge hears arguments over whether to keep the Anti-Weaponization Fund frozen for good. The administration claims it has already abandoned the fund; the plaintiffs want a permanent block anyway. This issue publishes into that hearing.

Fri, June 19: Juneteenth. Next week's issue marks it — and we will be sitting with Opal Lee, the 99-year-old "grandmother of Juneteenth," and her new memoir.

Tue, June 23: A doubly loaded day. Rep. LaMonica McIver argues her case before the Third Circuit, and New York holds its Democratic primary — the one that determines whether Adrienne Adams is on Hochul's ticket in November.

Late June / early July: The Supreme Court is expected to rule before its recess in Trump v. Barbara, the challenge to the administration's birthright-citizenship order — with direct stakes for Black immigrant women and their children. We will cover it the Friday after it lands.

Mon, Nov 3: Los Angeles holds its mayoral runoff. Mayor Karen Bass advanced from the first round and will face Councilmember Nithya Raman, who edged out the third-place finisher in late counting. The first time an LA incumbent has been forced to a runoff in two decades.

Ongoing — Tracking Callais: We are still following the fallout from Louisiana v. Callais. Among the threads we are watching: the Congressional Black Caucus's May 26 letter pressing more than 250 companies to publicly defend voting rights and oppose the post-Callais redistricting across the South, and the June 4 statement from six other caucuses backing that call. Responses are coming in. We will tell you what they amount to once the picture is clear.

ONE THING TO READ

For your weekend.

This week's recommendation is the National Employment Law Project's data brief, "Occupational Segregation of Black Women Workers in Health Care" — one of the sources underneath this issue's Headline.

I am recommending it because it answers a question the monthly jobs report never will: why does a downturn hit Black women so much harder than the topline suggests? The brief's answer is occupational segregation — the quiet machinery that crowds Black women into a narrow band of undervalued work, concentrated in health care and especially home care, where the pay is low and the fall is short. Its most haunting figure is the wage gap that holds at every level of education: 58.6 cents to a white man's dollar. The degree does not close it.

A note on the data: the brief was published in December 2024 and draws on Census surveys from 2018 to 2022. It is not breaking news. It is the standing architecture — the structure that was already there before this year's numbers started moving. Read it as the backdrop, and the Headline stops being a monthly surprise and starts being a pattern you can see coming.

Read at: nelp.org

AND, IF YOU HAVE TIME FOR TWO. Mara Gay's column in The New York Times, on the fight for voting rights in the South. Gay, an opinion writer at the Times, opens at a Montgomery rally with Martese Chism — a 65-year-old who traveled from Mississippi with her young great-nephew to honor her great-grandmother, a civil rights activist killed sixty years ago in the same struggle. It is a piece about how the assault on Black political power is not new, and how the people resisting it are so often carrying their family's history on their backs.

Read it next to the NELP brief: one explains why the economy keeps Black women down, the other why the vote that could change it is under siege. Read at: nytimes.com

A note on this week's figures: the May jobs report shows Black women's unemployment falling month-over-month to 6 percent. We have framed that carefully, because annual data from the Economic Policy Institute shows the rate rising over the year alongside falling labor force participation — a sign that some of the monthly improvement reflects women leaving the search, not finding work. We cite both because both are true. The structural fact does not change.

Stay rooted.

— LD

Black Lady News is a weekly curation by Leah Daughtry.
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Black Lady News · Issue 007 · June 2026

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