6-3. Not 9-0. And That's The Story

— A WEEKLY NOTE FROM LEAH DAUGHTRY —

Black

Lady

News

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

Issue No. 010

Friday, July 3, 2026

A NOTE FROM LEAH

It is Essence weekend. As you read this, New Orleans is filling up — the Superdome, the convention center, every hotel lobby within walking distance — with Black women who came to be together on purpose. Thirty-two years of it. A homecoming we built ourselves, because nobody else was going to.

And we arrive at it this year having just watched the Supreme Court hold a line we were not sure it would hold. On Tuesday, the Court ruled 6-3 that the Constitution still means what it has meant for more than a century: that a child born on this soil is a citizen of this country. It held. I want us to feel that — the relief of it, the weight of it — on a weekend made for joy.

But I have been doing this long enough to read the fine print, and so have you. But it held by a single vote on the question that matters most next time. So that is the posture for the season: we celebrate, and we stay ready. Both hands — joy in one, vigilance in the other. For Black women, that has always just been Tuesday.

Forward it to your group chat. Pull a stat for your next meeting. And if you are in New Orleans, drink water and wear good shoes.

Let's get into it.

THE HEADLINE · THE TERM-CLOSER

The 14th Amendment still stands — and so do we

In seventy-two hours at the close of its term, the Supreme Court did three things that touch us directly: it affirmed birthright citizenship, refused to let the president fire a Black woman from the Federal Reserve, and let the states keep counting our ballots. Three wins — and in each, the deeper question held by a single vote. Count them with me.

The Constitution: Trump v. Barbara

Start here, because everything else stands on it. The Fourteenth Amendment is what holds all of it up — equal protection, due process, the plain promise that if you are born here, you belong here. It is the amendment that made us citizens. So when the administration moved to redefine it by executive order on the first day of this term, it was not only immigrant families in the line of fire. It was the whole architecture of Black citizenship.

On Tuesday, the Court said no. By a vote of 6-3, in an opinion written by Chief Justice John Roberts, it struck down the order and held that a child born in the United States is a citizen at birth, full stop. Roberts grounded it where it has always lived — in the Amendment's 1868 ratification and the Court's own 1898 decision in United States v. Wong Kim Ark, the case of a man born in San Francisco to Chinese parents and told, wrongly, that he was not one of us.

The acute edge is real and we name it: there are roughly 5.6 million Black immigrants in this country, and about one in four Black Americans is an immigrant or the child of one. A different ruling would have landed on those families first and hardest. It did not come.

Now the fine print, because it is the whole game. The 6-3 is the result. The reasoning is narrower. Roberts wrote for a majority on constitutional grounds that included the three liberal justices — Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan, and Ketanji Brown Jackson — and exactly one conservative, Amy Coney Barrett. Brett Kavanaugh supplied the sixth vote but on different ground: he did not agree the Constitution barred the order, only that Congress hadn't authorized it, so the president couldn't act alone. Which means the Court split 5-4 on the question that comes next — whether a future Congress could do by statute what this president could not do by order. Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, and Neil Gorsuch dissented; Alito wrote that the Court had made "a serious mistake."

And sit with the number itself. Six to three — not nine to zero. Three justices of the United States Supreme Court looked at a sentence that has been in the Constitution since 1868 — that all persons born here and subject to its jurisdiction are citizens — and concluded it does not mean what it plainly says. When the plain words of the Constitution are themselves up for a vote, a win by three is still a win, but the ground under it is not bedrock. That is the warning folded inside the good news.

Read the dissent, and read the answer to it. Justice Clarence Thomas, in an opinion that ran nearly half the Court's 194 pages, leaned on Dred Scott and argued the Citizenship Clause was only ever meant for freed slaves and their descendants — that the majority had "devalued" citizenship. Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson answered him directly, and it is worth reading every line: she named the strangeness of a justice long devoted to a "colorblind" Constitution suddenly reading the Fourteenth Amendment as a narrow, race-bound remedy. Her point is close to the whole reason this publication exists — that it was Black Americans' fight for citizenship that opened the door for everyone who came after, Chinese immigrants included, and that the Amendment stands against caste on every axis there is. A majority of the Court remembered that on Tuesday. Only a majority.

So: it held — six to three, and by a single vote on the question of what a future Congress could still do. And within hours of losing, the president called on Congress to do exactly that: end birthright citizenship by statute, straight through the door Kavanaugh left open. Celebrate the ruling. Do not mistake it for the last word.

The firing: Trump v. Cook

The same week, the same Court told the president he could not, for now, fire Lisa Cook — the first Black woman ever to serve as a governor of the Federal Reserve. In a 5-4 decision, again authored by Roberts, the Court held that accepting the administration's argument would turn the Fed's "for cause" protection into at-will employment, out of step with the statute Congress wrote and the country's tradition of a central bank insulated from politics.

You have read this story here before. The administration moved to remove Cook over mortgage-fraud allegations — raised by its own housing-finance director, Bill Pulte, about conduct from before she joined the Fed; she has denied them and has not been charged. In her words, it was "an attempt to remove me on a manufactured pretext because I refused to bow to political pressure." This is the weaponization pattern with a name attached: the accusation as the punishment. We have watched it aimed at Letitia James, at L. Louise Lucas, at LaMonica McIver. Add a Fed governor to the list.

The names: Roberts wrote it, joined by Kavanaugh and the three liberals — Sotomayor, Kagan, and Jackson. The four dissenters were Thomas, Alito, Gorsuch, and Barrett. And the discipline word again is for now: the Court did not decide whether Cook can ultimately be fired. It said the president has to follow the law to do it — notice, a chance to respond — and sent the case back down. She keeps her seat while it proceeds.

And here is the catch we will not pretend away: on the very same day, in another Roberts opinion, the Court let the president fire FTC Commissioner Rebecca Kelly Slaughter, overturning the 1935 precedent Humphrey's Executor and expanding his power to remove officials at other independent agencies. The Fed was carved out as special. Everywhere else, the protection got thinner. The win is real. It is also bounded.

The ballots: Watson v. RNC

The third one is the brightest, and the quietest. In Watson v. Republican National Committee, the Court ruled 5-4 that Mississippi may keep counting mail ballots that are postmarked by Election Day and arrive within five business days. The RNC had argued federal law forbids it. The Court disagreed. The practical effect: the fourteen states and the District of Columbia that allow such a grace period get to keep it.

The spine of the win belongs to Ketanji Brown Jackson. At argument she pressed a plain point of restraint at her conservative colleagues: Congress has had every chance to forbid these state grace periods and has not, so it is not the Court's place to invent the ban. Amy Coney Barrett wrote the majority on exactly that logic, joined by Roberts and the three liberals. The dissent: Thomas, Alito, Gorsuch, and Kavanaugh. It is a setback for a president who has spent two years attacking mail voting — and a win for the simple proposition that a ballot mailed on time should be counted.

Seventy-two hours, three single votes

Put them side by side: birthright affirmed 6-3, a Black woman's seat at the Fed held 5-4, the right to count a mailed ballot held 5-4 — from the same Court that gutted Section 2 in Callais a season ago. It does not move in one direction. And in all three, Ketanji Brown Jackson was in the majority — the newest justice, a Black woman, on the right side of all three.

We name every justice on both sides because that is the work — next term they will be asked some of these questions again, and the margins tell you where to push.

WHY THIS MATTERS FOR US

Three times in three days the Court protected something that is ours — our citizenship, our seat at the table, our vote. And three times it protected it narrowly, by a margin of one, leaving the door cracked for the next attempt. The lesson is not to relax. It is to know exactly which votes held and which gave way, so that when the question comes back — and it will — we know where the line is and who is standing on which side of it. These wins held. Holding them next time is on us.

READ MORE. NPR (Barbara) · SCOTUSblog · CNBC (Cook) · CBS (Slaughter).

THE PROFILE

The person behind the number: Cheryl "Action" Jackson

The week the Court touched who gets to eat with public help, we want you to meet the woman who has spent two decades making sure people eat regardless.

WHO  Dr. Cheryl "Action" Jackson

WHAT  Founder & CEO, Minnie's Food Pantry

WHERE  Plano, Texas

SINCE  2008 — more than 31 million meals served

Cheryl "Action" Jackson. Courtesy Minnie's Food Pantry.

She started with two cans of corn and her first and last month's rent — and she tells that origin without softening it, because the point is not how small it was, but that she started. She named it for her mother, Dr. Minnie Hawthorne-Ewing, and built it in Plano in 2008. Since then it has served more than 31 million meals.

Jackson has been hungry herself, and she runs the pantry like someone who remembers it. Families do not slink in; they walk a red carpet. The dignity is the design, not the decoration. Oprah keynoted the tenth-anniversary gala; Rihanna handed her a Hometown Hero award on national television. Her faith is not a footnote to the work, it is the engine of it — she will tell you the superpower is the Lord, and then go unload a truck.

No more politics or statistics. There is a person behind every number you hear.

— Cheryl "Action" Jackson

We put her here on purpose. Up in The Five, a federal judge just blocked an effort to restrict what families can buy with SNAP. That is the policy; Jackson is what stands underneath it — the part that does not wait for a ruling. When the benefit shrinks and the number on the news goes up, somebody has to be standing in a Plano warehouse with a truck and a list of names. For two decades, she has been.

A distribution day in Plano - the line, the tents, the volunteers. Courtesy Minnie's Food Pantry.

Hunger does not discriminate, she likes to say. Neither does she. We are naming her on purpose — because the women who feed us rarely make the headline, and they should.

THE FIVE

Five things to know this week.

01  A judge blocks the SNAP purchase restrictions — narrowly.

On June 23, U.S. District Judge Amy Berman Jackson ruled the USDA lacked authority to approve state requests barring SNAP recipients from buying soda and candy. Read the win small: it applies only to the five states where the plaintiffs live — Colorado, Iowa, Nebraska, Tennessee, West Virginia — even as the USDA had cleared restrictions in nearly two dozen, and it will likely be appealed. Set aside, not settled. It matters to us because about one in four Black households receives SNAP — roughly three times the rate of white households (Census, 2023) — and many of those households are led by women.

U.S. District Court, D.D.C.

02  Maxine Waters helps move the biggest housing bill in a generation.

The biggest housing bill in a generation passed both chambers — and the president won't sign it. The 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act cleared the Senate 85-5 and the House 358-32, and then Trump abruptly canceled the signing, refusing to act until Congress passes the SAVE America Act, a bill tightening voter-registration and ID rules — the same voting fight we track everywhere else. He derided it as the "Warren-centric" bill. Call the name who helped build it: Rep. Maxine Waters, ranking member of House Financial Services, who developed the House version with Chairman French Hill. It may still become law automatically within ten days, signature or not. The stakes for us are structural — the Black-white homeownership gap runs about 28 points, the widest of any group.

U.S. House · U.S. Senate

03  Tracking Callais: Georgia, deferred — not defeated.

The post-Callais redistricting fight grinds on, and the standing rule applies: a threat shelved is not a threat gone. Georgia's special-session push was called off, but the door was left open past 2028. We keep the map up because the people drawing these lines are counting on us to look away. We are not going to.

BLN tracking

04  McIver's appeal is still under advisement.

Rep. LaMonica McIver — the first sitting member of Congress this administration moved to prosecute, charged after an oversight visit to an ICE facility — is waiting on the Third Circuit, which heard her appeal and has not yet ruled. Hold it next to Cook in the Headline and the shape is unmistakable: the accusation deployed as the punishment, aimed again and again at Black women who would not stand down.

Third Circuit · BLN tracking

05  The number under the celebration: about 1%.

Roughly one percent of venture capital goes to Black women founders (Crunchbase). We are putting that here, in The Five, and not in The Win — because The Win is for celebration without an asterisk, and this is the asterisk. Read it before you read the last section, so that when you see what two hundred women built, you understand exactly what they built it against.

Industry data · verify source

THE WIN

Two hundred founders. Four billion dollars.

Some weeks the Win is a verdict. This week it is an archive — and a roll call.

A founder named Amira Rasool — who raised millions for her own company, The Folklore — decided to stop counting the losses of entrepreneurship and start counting the wins. So she built The First 200: a first-of-its-kind index naming the first two hundred U.S.-based Black women founders to raise a million dollars in venture capital. Together, those two hundred women have raised four billion dollars, by the project's count.

Say some of their names. At number one, Etosha Cave of Twelve, which makes fuel out of thin air. At number two, Toyin Ajayi of Cityblock Health, tech-enabled primary care for the underserved. At number three, Rihanna, for Savage X Fenty. Behind them, a hundred and ninety-seven more — in beauty and biotech and braiding hair and women's health, each one having walked through a door that barely opens.

An index is a small thing and an enormous thing: it says this happened, and here is the receipt. Rasool built it because she got tired of the story being only about the struggle. So this week, so are we. Two hundred women. Four billion dollars. Names in the book. Stay rooted, and go look yourself up in a few years.

THE WATCH

What we are watching next.

A season of gathering. The first one starts today.

Today – Sun, July 3–5: Essence Festival of Culture, New Orleans — the Caesars Superdome and the convention center, the festival's 32nd year, over the Fourth of July weekend. Joy as strategy.

July 6–11: Zeta Phi Beta's International Grand Boulé, Nashville. We will have more to say about Zeta's leadership next week — circle it.

July 18–22: 117th NAACP National Convention, McCormick Place, Chicago — theme "We, The People."

July 18–24: Alpha Kappa Alpha's Boulé, Las Vegas.

ONE THING TO READ

For your weekend.

This week, read the opinion itself. Chief Justice Roberts's majority in Trump v. Barbara is short and plain — a clear walk through why the Fourteenth Amendment means what it has meant since 1868, anchored in the 1898 Wong Kim Ark decision that settled it the first time.

Read the dissents too — and Kavanaugh's separate opinion most of all, the one that agreed with the outcome but not the reason, and said Congress could still try. That is the map of the next fight. Count the votes yourself, and you will understand both what we won and how it could be challenged.

Read at: supremecourt.gov — opinions of the Court, or via SCOTUSblog.

Stay rooted.

— LD

Black Lady News is a weekly curation by Leah Daughtry.
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Black Lady News · Issue 010 · July 2026

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