Pay Me Back

— A WEEKLY NOTE FROM LEAH DAUGHTRY —

Black

Lady

News

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

Issue No. 009

Friday, June 26, 2026

A NOTE FROM LEAH

When I was coming up, Queen Mother Moore used to visit The House of the Lord Church in Brooklyn, where my father, the Rev. Dr. Herbert Daughtry, pastored. She was a dear friend of his — one of those elders whose presence rearranged a room — and I heard her speak more times than I can count. She never softened the word reparations, and she never dressed it up. She would look out at us and say it plain: Pay me back.

I thought about her all week. Because on March 25, the United Nations General Assembly did the thing she spent seven decades demanding: it named the trafficking and enslavement of Africans the gravest crime against humanity, and it called for repair. One hundred twenty-three nations voted yes. Three voted no. This week, in Accra, the world gathered to turn that vote into a plan. The words she said in a Brooklyn pew are now on the floor of the General Assembly. She did not live to see it. We did.

And it lands in the same season the same Court keeps deciding who gets to stay. This week it told three hundred fifty thousand Haitians — people who have lived and worked here legally for years — that their protection can be stripped and they can be sent home. Any day now it may rule on whether a child born on this soil is American at all. Two questions, one root: what is owed, and who belongs. Freedom delayed, then declared. Citizenship promised, now contested. Repair, at last, demanded out loud. Queen Mother Moore would tell us none of it is separate. It never was.

So that's the week — a ruling that clears the way to deport hundreds of thousands of Haitians, the reckoning at the UN over what slavery owes, a pregnant congresswoman dragged into court for doing her job, Callais still grinding on, and a Black woman who now decides what one of this country's legacy magazines puts in front of you.

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

Let's get into it.

THE HEADLINE

The Court didn't call it legal. It just opened the door and told them to go.

Mullin v. Doe / Trump v. Miot

On Thursday, by 6 to 3, the Supreme Court cleared the way to strip Temporary Protected Status from 350,000 Haitians — and thousands of Syrians — and send them home. Read that carefully, because the Court was careful: it did not rule that ending these protections was lawful. It refused to pause the terminations while that question is still being fought in the lower courts. The lawsuits go on. The people lose their status now, in the meantime. Set aside, not settled — and in the life of a family, the difference is a plane.

Two things the majority did, and you should know both. First, it held that the courts may not review how the Secretary ended TPS — not even the claim that she skipped the consultation the statute requires.

Justice Kagan warned that this makes the law's mandatory steps "precatory" — a Secretary could announce she consulted no one, and no court could touch it.

Second — and this is the one to sit with — the Haitian plaintiffs argued the termination was driven by racial animus, and they had the receipts: the President's own words about Haitians. The majority looked at those words, called them "not overtly racial," and declined to reprint them. Justice Kagan, in dissent with Justices Sotomayor and Jackson, reprinted them anyway, insisting they enter the official record — statements about Haitians so degrading that the Court that quoted everything else would not put them on its own pages. When the highest court in the land would rather avert its eyes than name what's in front of it, the averting is the story.

The fight isn't over, and Black women are leading it. Guerline Jozef and the Haitian Bridge Alliance — which organizes for Black migrants, and for women and girls in particular — have been in this case from the start, and the litigation continues on remand. But the human cost is immediate. Among the hundreds of thousands: a Maryland mother who gave birth here days before her husband was detained and deported — and whose newborn son's citizenship now rides on the birthright case this same Court is expected to decide any day.

Because that's the through-line. The Court that gutted the Voting Rights Act in Callais. The Court weighing whether being born here still makes you American. The government that told the United Nations this month it owes nothing for slavery. Who is owed. Who can stay. Who belongs. Same Court. Same season. Same question, asked of the same people.

WHY THIS MATTERS FOR US

A court that can look at the plainest evidence of racial contempt and call it "policy" — and tell 350,000 Black immigrants there is no judge who will hear them — is a court telling us something about whose claims it will entertain and whose it won't. We keep the receipts. Justice Kagan kept them Thursday. So will we.

THE DISPATCH · GLOBAL REPARATIONS

In Accra, reparations got a roadmap — and the U.S. voted no.

This week, while one Court in Washington weighed who gets to belong, a different reckoning was being settled an ocean away. In Accra, heads of state, foreign ministers, scholars, and diaspora representatives spent three days — June 17 to 19 — turning a promise into a plan.

The promise came in March. On the 25th, the UN General Assembly adopted a Ghana-led resolution — backed by the African Union and CARICOM — naming the trafficking and enslavement of Africans "the gravest crime against humanity" and calling for reparatory justice. The vote was 123 in favor. Fifty-two nations abstained, including the United Kingdom and all 27 members of the European Union. And three nations voted no.

Name them: the United States. Israel. Argentina.

Washington's reasoning is worth sitting with, because you have heard its logic before. The U.S. representative said the country does not recognize a legal right to reparations for historical wrongs that were not illegal under international law at the time. Read that again with this week's other headline in mind. The law as it was written gets to define what justice is owed. That is the same machinery beneath the fight over birthright citizenship and the stripping of TPS — who counts, what's owed, and whether a wrong becomes acceptable simply because the law once allowed it.

Here is the part that belongs to us. The Accra roadmap did not treat women as a footnote. It named the disproportionate weight slavery and colonialism placed on women and girls, honored their place at the front of every resistance movement, and called for reparatory justice that is gender-responsive — built around the people who carried the cost and led the fight. And it produced more than language: the Netherlands pledged to return some 2,000 artefacts to Ghana, and Germany agreed to repatriate cultural objects from the Bono Traditional Area. The outcome document will feed the UN Secretary-General's report to the General Assembly this fall.

On June 19 — Juneteenth — the delegates marked the day at Christiansborg Castle, a fort that once held the stolen before the crossing. Freedom delayed, then declared, meeting the unfinished business of what it was all worth. We are watching this.

THE PROFILE

She stitches the proof.

Sherry Shine, "The Traveler in Purple" (2020). Collection of and photo by Leah Daughtry.

Some weeks the Profile is a woman taking power in a boardroom or a courtroom. This week it's a woman taking it with a needle.

Sherry Shine is a fiber artist from East Orange, New Jersey — the same small stretch of the state that gave us Faith Ringgold and Bisa Butler, as if the ground there grows women who tell Black stories in cloth. She did not come to it young or easy. She spent some twenty years working in the public sector, quilting at night after a friend's aunt, a longarm quilter, took her under her wing. Self-taught into the form and later studying at FIT, she built a body of work in fine silks and vintage fabrics that does one thing above all: it refuses to show Black people as broken.

Her quilts follow the journey of the African in America — men and women working a farm, heading North, traveling back South, dressed in dignity and caught mid-stride. "The Traveler in Purple," the 2020 piece that hangs in my own home, is one of them: a woman in a wide-brimmed hat and a full skirt the exact color of this publication, paused on her way to somewhere. She has shown at the National Constitution Center in Philadelphia, the Michigan State University Museum, Bank Street College, and the Brooklyn Public Library.

Shine says the work is about memory, and she says why better than I could: we make it, she has explained, because "we did not always have proof of lives lived."

That is the whole issue, said in one breath. While courts argue over who can stay and who belongs, while the world debates what slavery owes, here is a Black woman answering the same questions with her hands — not arguing for the record, but making it. Harriet Powers did it. Faith Ringgold did it. Sherry Shine does it now. We keep our own history. Sometimes we stitch it.

THE FIVE

Five things to know this week.

TRACKING CALLAIS

Georgia: the gerrymander that got called off — for now.

Gov. Brian Kemp called a special session for June 17 and asked lawmakers to redraw Georgia's congressional and legislative maps for 2028 — a move that would have made Georgia the first state to apply Callais to its own statehouse. It didn't happen. Hours before the session opened, House Speaker Jon Burns told Kemp the chamber would not take up redistricting at all. The announcement came as hundreds of voting-rights advocates filled the Capitol chanting Black voters matter.

Make no mistake about what was at stake. Fair Fight estimated as many as 26 Democratic-held seats with large minority populations could have been redrawn out of reach. Georgia's existing maps stand for 2026; the 2028 fight was postponed, not won. Kemp left that door open.

Still — in a beat that has been one loss after another, this is a state where Black Georgians showed up, made noise, and the pen was set down. State Rep. Tanya Miller, a Black woman now running for attorney general, named the through-line plainly: "While we are no longer dealing with dogs and hoses, we are dealing instead with the pen that draws the maps."

The watch: if Keisha Lance Bottoms wins the governor's office in November, she could block a 2028 redraw outright. This week, for once, the line held.

THE THROUGH-LINE

The process is the punishment. Ask LaMonica McIver.

On Wednesday, a pregnant congresswoman stood in a Delaware courtroom and asked three federal judges to end a prosecution that could cost her 17 years. Rep. LaMonica McIver — a first-term Democrat from Newark, in office barely two years — is charged with three counts stemming from a 2025 oversight visit to an ICE detention facility, the kind of visit members of Congress are entitled by law to make. Her lawyers argued the Speech or Debate Clause protects her, and that she has been singled out for her politics. The panel weighed it for two hours and left without ruling. Even a Trump-appointed judge pressed the government on how weak the case looked.

McIver named the strategy plainly outside the courthouse: "The process is the pain for them."

She is not alone, and that is the point. Letitia James. Fani Willis. Lisa Cook. Louise Lucas. The charge may not stick — but the years of legal jeopardy, the fees, the headlines, the threat of prison hanging over a pregnancy: that is the punishment, delivered without a conviction. We're watching this — a Third Circuit ruling could come any time.

01  Black women built an AI. It's called Aisha.

On June 25, Aisha (say it Eye-ee-sha) launches to the public — an AI assistant built, its makers say, to serve the people mainstream AI keeps failing. It comes from Onyx Impact, the nonprofit founded by Esosa Osa, a veteran of Fair Fight's voting-rights and anti-disinformation work. The premise is in the name: an assistant that centers Black sources, Black history, and Black-led news instead of treating them as an afterthought. What it claims to do: cite vetted, often Black-led sources, protect user privacy, and run on its own model alongside a major commercial one. The headline is simpler: a Black woman who spent years fighting disinformation decided to build the alternative herself.

Try it — aisha.ai

02  Primary night: where the money won, and where Black women advanced anyway.

In Maryland's open 5th District — Steny Hoyer's seat after decades — a field of two dozen Democrats included three Black women, but it was Del. Adrian Boafo, Hoyer's endorsed successor, who won on more than $8 million in outside spending. Where the money was overwhelming, it held. But the night still belonged, in part, to Black women advancing to November — across the aisle. In Howard County, Vanessa Atterbeary won the Democratic nomination for county executive; if she wins in the fall, she'd be the county's first Black woman in the job. Statewide, Sonya Dunn — a businesswoman, media personality, and pastor's daughter from Prince George's County — took the Republican nomination for Comptroller, and faces Democratic incumbent Brooke Lierman in November. One Democrat, one Republican, both Black women, both on the ballot this fall. We don't pretend our women all vote the same way. We just call them all by their names. And in Brooklyn, Yvette Clarke handily won her primary — keeping the only Black woman in New York's congressional delegation, and the chair of the Congressional Black Caucus, right where she is.

AP · NY & MD State Boards of Elections

03  Black Music Month closes where it should: with the woman who started it.

Before Elvis, before Chuck Berry, before any of the men the history books crowned, there was a Black woman from Arkansas with an electric guitar and a Pentecostal upbringing, playing distorted licks in the 1940s that wouldn't have a name until white men played them a decade later. Sister Rosetta Tharpe — the Godmother of Rock and Roll. Chuck Berry called his whole career "one long Sister Rosetta Tharpe impersonation." Little Richard, Elvis, Johnny Cash, Tina Turner — all of them, downstream of her. And the record forgot her. She died in 1973 and lay in an unmarked grave for years; the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame didn't induct her until 2018. We close Black Music Month on her on purpose. She is the whole point: we built the sound, the world took the credit, and we keep the receipts until it's set right.

Rock & Roll Hall of Fame

THE WIN

A'ja Wilson is on the Wheaties box.

Courtesy of Wheaties / General Mills.

Some weeks the Win is a ruling. This week it's a cereal box — the orange one, the one that's meant the summit of American sport since 1934. A'ja Wilson is on it.

Fewer than forty women have earned that box in more than ninety years. The list of Black women on it you can count on one hand — Serena Williams, Simone Biles, Coco Gauff, Dominique Dawes — and now Wilson joins them. And she did it the way she does everything: on her own terms and ahead of schedule. Plenty of the men who got there first landed the box after a single big season. Wilson arrived with three championships, four MVPs, two Finals MVPs, and a brand-new contract that makes her the highest-paid player in the history of her league.

The box comes with a $50,000 donation to the A'ja Wilson Foundation, which she built with her parents to support kids with dyslexia and to push back on bullying — the same dyslexia she has spoken about carrying herself. So this isn't only a picture on a shelf. It's a champion who turned her own hardest thing into a hand back for somebody else's child.

Put her on your grocery list. Then put her on your mood board. She earned every inch of that box, and she's not close to done.

THE WATCH

What we're watching next.

A few dates worth circling.

Mon, June 29: The Supreme Court's term ends, and the ruling in Trump v. Barbara — whether a child born on U.S. soil is still a citizen at all — is expected on the last day. After this week, you already know which way to brace. This is the one to refresh your browser for.

July 3–5 · New Orleans: The Essence Festival of Culture returns for its 32nd year — the Fourth of July homecoming for Black women and culture. Teyana Taylor takes over as chief curator; Nikole Hannah-Jones and Mara Brock Akil curate the Book Festival.

July 18–24 · two cities at once: The NAACP's 117th National Convention lands in Chicago, July 18–22, under the theme "We, The People." The same stretch, Alpha Kappa Alpha's 72nd Boule fills Las Vegas, July 18–24, with some 25,000 women. Black America convenes, in force, all at once.

Ongoing: The John R. Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act. Still stalled in the Senate. Still the fix for everything in Tracking Callais.

ONE THING TO READ

For your weekend.

Photo: Bon Appétit / Condé Nast.

Set the docket down for a minute. The real point of this week's read is who chose it: Bon Appétit is run now by Jamila Robinson, a Black woman who came up through Black food-and-culture journalism before she took the top chair, in the years after the magazine's own public reckoning over how it treated staff of color. A commission like this one doesn't happen by accident. It happens because of who's deciding what's worth a feature.

And what she put on the table is a photo essay — on the Oklahoma Black rodeo and trail ride: the feasting, the dancing, the caretaking that have held this corner of Black Western life together for generations, in towns most maps forget and most magazines never visit. While the courts argue over who gets to belong here, here is a people who have belonged all along — on the land, in the saddle, at the table. Nobody granted them that. They built it.

READ AT. bonappetit.com — search "Black rodeo cowboy culture Oklahoma."

Stay rooted.

— LD

Black Lady News is a weekly curation by Leah Daughtry.
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Black Lady News · Issue 009 · June 2026

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