Black Lady News

— A WEEKLY NOTE FROM LEAH DAUGHTRY —

Black

Lady

News

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

Issue No. 011

Friday, July 10, 2026

Ask who paid for them.

A NOTE FROM LEAH

We just watched the country turn 250.

Fireworks over the Mall. Tall ships. A great deal of talk about the founders — their genius, their compromises, the long arc of a freedom that was supposed to widen.

I want to tell you where I was sitting while I watched.

My fourth great-grandmother, Eliza, was born enslaved in 1789 — two years after the Constitution was written, the same year George Washington took office. She was sold to a man named Charles Daughtry. He fathered a son by her, a son who he would list on his property rolls. My family stayed in bondage until Emancipation.

So I do not come to this anniversary as a guest. I come to it carrying the name of the man who enslaved her.

Let me say the thing plainly: I am cynical about this country. I have earned that. Every Black woman reading this has earned it. When they tell me America was founded on liberty, I know the arithmetic — I know what year Eliza was born, and what was done to her, and what she was worth on paper. I do not need to be persuaded about the gap between what this nation says and what it does.

My family is the gap.

And yet.

I have spent my life inside this country's rooms. Convention halls. Committee meetings. Pulpits. I have worked to make those rooms hold more people, and I would not have given my life to that work if I did not believe it was possible.

I am not cynical about the possibilities. That is precisely what I fight for.

Cynicism about the country and faith in its possibility are not opposites in us. They have always lived in the same body. Ask any Black woman who ever registered voters in a place that would not count her ballot.

So: 250 years. In April the Supreme Court hollowed out the Voting Rights Act. Since then Louisiana has erased a majority-Black district, and Alabama, South Carolina, and Tennessee have moved.

This is not a birthday issue. This is a receipts issue.

We are also profiling a woman who stands for election this very morning, celebrating a Black woman who will lead the largest labor union in America, and pointing you toward a conversation about what comes after the defending.

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

Let's get into it.

THE HEADLINE

250, and the receipts

The semiquincentennial arrived on schedule. So did the bill.

On April 29, in Louisiana v. Callais, the Supreme Court held that Louisiana's congressional map leaned too heavily on the race of voters — and in doing so, hollowed out Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, the provision that for sixty years barred voting rules that discriminate by race. Justice Samuel Alito wrote for the majority. His reasoning, in essence: letting race factor into government decisions departs from the rule that governs nearly everything else.

Read that sentence again, and then read the calendar. Section 2 exists because race factored into everything else. That was the point. The remedy was built in the shape of the harm.

What has happened since

Louisiana suspended its May 16 House primaries by executive order. By late May the Legislature had passed a new map: five solidly Republican districts and one Democratic district stitching Black communities from New Orleans up to Baton Rouge. The second majority-Black district — the one Rep. Cleo Fields holds, running diagonally from Baton Rouge to Shreveport — is gone. The Louisiana Legislative Black Caucus said it would back only a map preserving both. It did not get one. The state's House races now go to an open primary on November 3, with qualifying August 5–7.

Alabama's map is already cleared and in effect. This is further along than Louisiana. On May 26, a three-judge panel ruled — for the second time — that Alabama's 2023 map intentionally discriminated against Black voters in violation of the 14th Amendment. On June 2, the Supreme Court granted Alabama's emergency request, 6-3 and unsigned, and let the state use that map anyway. It cuts one of Alabama's two majority-Black districts. Justice Sotomayor, dissenting for the three liberals, wrote that as Alabama doubled down on racial discrimination, the Court doubled down on chaos.

Rep. Shomari Figures holds AL-02 — a district that exists only because the Court ruled in Allen v. Milligan (2023) that Alabama had diluted Black voting power. He is the first Black congressman from south Alabama, elected in 2024 with 54.6%. His seat has been redrawn beneath him, and he is likely to lose it. Alabama's primaries were postponed; special primaries run August 11 in the four affected districts, and the May 19 results there are nullified.

Say the rest of it plainly: if Figures loses in November, the only Black member of Alabama's seven-seat delegation will be Rep. Terri Sewell — one Black woman, in a state where one in four residents is Black.

South Carolina and Tennessee are moving too. Tennessee's target is the Memphis-anchored seat — one of the largest majority-Black cities in America. In South Carolina, it is Jim Clyburn's district.

WHY THIS MATTERS FOR US

The Voting Rights Act was not a gift from Washington. It was extracted. It was organized into existence by people who were beaten on a bridge and jailed in Winona and fired from jobs and put off land for trying to register. A disproportionate number of them were Black women, and most of them will never be named in a textbook.

When the protections come off, they come off of us first — because the map is drawn around us. Dilute the Black vote and you dilute the constituency that sends Black women to Congress, to statehouses, to school boards. Every seat we have was cut out of that rock.

Voting power is not one issue among several. It is the mechanism by which every other issue gets touched. Pull it and the rest of the house comes down.

The lineage nobody put on the fireworks program

Glynda Carr, who leads Higher Heights for America, wrote it plainly in the Amsterdam News the week of the Fourth: a country cannot mark 250 years of democracy while unmaking the very voting rights Black people — and Black women in particular — spent generations securing.

She is right. The lineage she names is living. Stacey Abrams, who rebuilt Georgia's political ground from the precinct up. LaTosha Brown, whose Black Voters Matter has spent a decade organizing the exact states now redrawing their lines. Melanie Campbell at the National Coalition on Black Civic Participation. Shavon Arline-Bradley, carrying Dorothy Height's forty years at the National Council of Negro Women.

And behind them, Hamer — who did not ask whether America was ready, and did not wait to be invited.

Rights on paper are not rights in practice. That is the oldest lesson we have, and we are being asked to learn it again at 250.

What the anniversary is actually for

An anniversary is not a verdict. It is an accounting. Every widening of the franchise in this country has been answered by a narrowing, and somebody has always had to hold the line.

That somebody has, with exhausting regularity, been us.

So mark the 250th. But tell the truth. The Declaration was not a gift to us; when it was signed, it did not mean us. Dr. King called it a promissory note, and said America had returned it marked insufficient funds. That is the correct way to hold this document — not as treasure, but as debt. It is still outstanding. We are still the creditors.

Then find out when qualifying closes in your state.

The country is 250 years old.
The work is not finished.
Neither are we.

READ MORE. Amsterdam News · Louisiana Illuminator · NOLA.com · The 19th.

THE PROFILE

The vote is this morning: Dr. Stacie NC Grant

WHO Dr. Stacie NC Grant

WHAT 26th International President, Zeta Phi Beta Sorority, Inc.

WHERE Grand Boulé, Nashville — running July 6–11

WHEN Stands for election to a second term this morning

As you read this, the Grand Boulé is underway in Nashville, and Dr. Stacie NC Grant stands for election to a second term as International President of Zeta Phi Beta Sorority, Incorporated.

We are publishing into that. We do not know the outcome. Neither, at this hour, does she.

That is a strange and honest place for a newsletter to stand, and it is the right one — because what can be said about Grant does not depend on what happens on that floor.

The record

Grant is the 26th International President of a sorority founded at Howard University in 1920 by five women who wanted something different from what existed: an organization built on scholarship, service, sisterly love, and finer womanhood.

Before she led Zeta nationally, she built locally. She is the founding president of the Phi Zeta Zeta chapter in Queens, New York — which is to say she did the unglamorous thing first. She chartered. She recruited. She kept minutes. Anyone who has ever tried to stand up a chapter from nothing knows that the founding president is the one who eats the failure if it does not take.

It took.

Why we are running this today, and not next week

The thing worth seeing is this morning: a woman in a ballroom in Nashville, standing for the judgment of her sisters. Not a coronation. An election. Thousands of women who have paid their dues, literally, deciding whether the last four years earned four more.

That is a form of democracy older in Black America than most of the ones the country celebrated last weekend. Black women's organizations have been running free and fair elections, with contested slates and floor votes and orderly transfers of power, since long before Black women could vote in the country that housed them. The Divine Nine did not wait for the franchise. Neither did the church boards, the missionary societies, the state federations of colored women's clubs.

We built the ballot box we were denied.

When people ask where Black women learned to organize, the answer is: in rooms like the one in Nashville this morning.

By the time you finish your coffee, Zeta's members will have decided. Whatever they decide, the record of the last four years is already written — and we will bring you the result.

THE FIVE

Five things to know this week.

01 Louisiana's new map is law, and the primary moved.

The Legislature gave final approval in late May to a congressional map that eliminates one of the state's two majority-Black districts — the seat held by Rep. Cleo Fields. Five solidly Republican districts, one Democratic. Note the mechanics, because they matter: there is no spring primary anymore. Louisiana votes in an open primary November 3, and qualifying runs August 5–7. If you know someone thinking about running, that window is four weeks out.

NOLA.com · Louisiana Illuminator · LA Secretary of State

02 Juliana Stratton is the nominee. The math is now three.

Correcting the record from our own pages: Stratton did not merely advance — she won Illinois's Democratic Senate primary in March, defeating Rep. Raja Krishnamoorthi, with Rep. Robin Kelly third. She faces Republican Don Tracy in November. If she wins, Stratton becomes the sixth Black woman ever to serve in the U.S. Senate, and the third serving at the same time — with Angela Alsobrooks of Maryland and Lisa Blunt Rochester of Delaware. That has never happened. Say Robin Kelly's name too: Illinois was the only race this cycle with two Black women running against each other, and both of them ran on their records.

The 19th · CNN

03 Six weeks after Beatty won, the tarp is still up.

The Kennedy Center facade, summer 2026. The name Congress gave it in 1964 is behind the tarp. Credit: [SOURCE: New York Times]

When we last wrote about Rep. Joyce Beatty's suit, a federal judge had just ruled that the Kennedy Center's board had no authority to put the President's name on a building Congress named for John F. Kennedy in 1964. Here is what has happened since. The letters came down in the early hours of June 13 — and a tarp went up over the blank facade, where it remains. Look at what is left legible: The John F. … orming Arts. The board appealed. On Wednesday, a federal panel refused to restore the name while that appeal proceeds. One of the three judges was appointed by Trump. Beatty has told the court the tarps are petulant defiance. The judge has ordered the Center to explain them by the end of July. Its board meets this month. Set aside is not settled — the appeal itself has not been decided.

NPR · Variety · Forbes

04 The AFT convenes in Washington next week.

The American Federation of Teachers holds its convention July 16–19 at the Walter E. Washington Convention Center. Watch Stacy Davis Gates — president of the Chicago Teachers Union, president of the Illinois Federation of Teachers, and an AFT vice president. Teachers' unions are, at this moment, one of the few national institutions where Black women hold real structural power. That is not sentiment; it is org charts. See also: this week's Win.

AFT

05 Black Women's Equal Pay Day is July 21.

Circle it. The date moves later each year that the gap widens, which is a grim way to keep a calendar. Current figures next week. Start the conversation early — in your workplace, in your chapter, at your table.

THE WIN

Princess Moss will lead the NEA

Two Black women. Back to back. At the top of the largest labor union in America.

At its Representative Assembly in Denver this month, the National Education Association elected Princess Moss as its next president. She succeeds Becky Pringle, who has led the union's nearly three million members since 2020.

Moss is not a parachute. She taught elementary music in Louisa County, Virginia, for twenty-one years — the daughter of two school bus drivers, in a family that understood the work of getting other people's children where they needed to go. She led the Virginia Education Association. She served the NEA as secretary-treasurer, then six years as vice president. She has been in the building. She has counted the money. She knows where the bodies of every budget fight are buried.

She takes office in September.

Let us say what this is. The nation's largest union — one that represents the people who teach the country's children — will have been led by a Black woman continuously from 2020 into the 2030s. Not a first followed by a retreat. A first, followed by a second.

We have watched a great many rooms close this year. Corporate boards, federal agencies, university presidencies, the maps themselves. Here is a room that did not close. Three million educators voted, and they chose her.

Congratulations, Madam President-elect. The apple on the desk is yours.

THE WATCH

What we are watching next.

Seven dates worth circling. The first one is this morning.

Fri, July 10 — this morning. Zeta Phi Beta's Grand Boulé in Nashville elects its International President. Dr. Stacie NC Grant stands for a second term.

Thu–Sun, July 16–19. AFT Convention, Walter E. Washington Convention Center, Washington, D.C.

Sat–Wed, July 18–22. The 117th NAACP National Convention, McCormick Place, Chicago. Theme: We, The People.

Sat–Fri, July 18–24. Alpha Kappa Alpha's Boulé convenes in Las Vegas. Charletta Wilson Jacks is installed as International President on July 24.

Tue, July 21. Black Women's Equal Pay Day.

Wed, Aug 5 – Fri, Aug 7. Qualifying for Louisiana's congressional races. The map is new. The window is short.

Tue, Aug 11. Alabama's special congressional primaries in the four redrawn districts, including Rep. Shomari Figures's AL-02. The May 19 results there were nullified.

Ongoing. The John R. Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act. Still stalled. Still needed.

ONE THING TO READ

For your weekend — a listen, actually.

"America at 250: Imagining a New Democracy" — LaTosha Brown, on Democracy in Color, July 2, 2026.

LaTosha Brown co-founded Black Voters Matter in 2016. In the decade since, she has organized Black voters across Alabama, Georgia, Mississippi, Florida, and Louisiana — the same states now redrawing their maps.

Her argument is the one this issue keeps circling: that the task is bigger than a midterm. That defending the democracy we inherited was never the whole assignment. The assignment is building the one that has never yet fully existed.

She learned to vote from her grandparents, Joseph and Nellie Gamble, born in Jim Crow Alabama in 1905 and 1910 — grown, and then some, before they were permitted to cast a ballot. When they finally could, they did not treat it casually. Neither does she. On what the vote actually is, Brown has put it this way: "The evidence that I am human is based on the power of choice."

At 250, that is the inheritance worth naming. Not the founding. The finishing.

Listen at: democracyincolor.com

Stay rooted.

— LD

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Black Lady News · Issue 011 · July 2026

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