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. 012

Friday, July 17, 2026

Sixty-three cents.

A NOTE FROM LEAH

I have spent a good part of my life in rooms where the bargaining happens. Here is the thing nobody tells you about those rooms: getting into one is not the same as getting paid. Those are two separate fights, and the second one is longer.

Look at who's leading American labor right now. April Verrett has the SEIU. Roxanne Brown has the Steelworkers, the largest industrial union on this continent, elected unanimously this spring. Becky Pringle has the NEA until September, when Princess Moss takes it. Stacy Davis Gates holds a big-city local, a state federation, and a vice presidency of the AFT, and she is in Washington this week. We are not knocking on the door. We are in the room and we are leading it.

And on Tuesday, the women they represent will still be working to catch what a white man earned last year.

That is this whole issue. Fawn Weaver built a company out of a story this country buried, and now she doesn't work there, and every account of what happened was filed by somebody on the other side of her. Erica Schwartz is being handed an agency somebody else broke and asked to make it whole. And last night the President went on primetime, pointed at Beijing, and asked Congress for voter ID and documentary proof of citizenship. One of the two websites he stood up belongs to the Civil Rights Division. We built that in 1957. We fought for it and we won it. It carries his photograph now.

I am not going to pretend that ties up neatly. It doesn't. But we are going to look straight at it.

Let's get into it.

THE HEADLINE

The bargaining table

Yesterday morning, 9:30 a.m., the Walter E. Washington Convention Center. The American Federation of Teachers gaveled in its 89th biennial convention, and through Sunday, Washington belongs to the people who teach this country's children. Randi Weingarten holds the gavel. She's held it since 2008.

Tuesday, July 21, is Black Women's Equal Pay Day. Four days from now. That's not a holiday. That's an accounting. It is the date, deep into the eighth month, when Black women finally earn what white, non-Hispanic men earned by the previous December 31st. Nearly seven extra months of work to catch a paycheck that was already cashed.

Sixty-three cents on the dollar. Sixty-five if you narrow it to full-time, year-round workers. Women with the good jobs, the steady ones, the ones with benefits. Sixty-five cents.

Last year Equal Pay Day landed on July 10. This year it's the 21st. Eleven days later. And the year before that it moved later too. The gap has now widened two years running. That has not happened since the 1960s. Not narrowed slowly. Not stalled. Widened. Twice.

Congress has the number in writing. H.Con.Res.21 puts it plainly: at the current rate, Black women close the wage gap in 121 years. White women close theirs in 43. Nobody in this newsletter will be alive for either. Neither will our daughters. The resolution says the quiet part in Roman type. This is not a problem anyone is currently solving.

Now hold that next to what happened in June.

The Joint Center runs the numbers on every BLS jobs report and tells you what they mean for Black workers, because BLS won't. Their June read: the national unemployment rate ticked down to 4.2 percent. Black unemployment held at 6.6 percent, still the highest of any racial group in the country. White workers, 3.6. Asian workers, 3.9. Hispanic workers, 5.2. Black workers, 6.6, and 29,000 fewer of us employed than the month before.

Underneath that number, a split. Black men's unemployment rate fell, 7.3 to 7.0. Black women's rate rose, 6.0 to 6.2.

Same month. Same economy. Opposite directions.

And here's the part that should stop you. The national rate went down, but labor force participation went down with it. 61.5 percent, the lowest since March 2021. The household survey counted 507,000 fewer people at work. The rate didn't improve because more people found jobs. It improved because fewer people were counted as looking. Joint Center says it carefully: the lower rate does not fully reflect a stronger labor market.

So: the country's number falls because people give up. Black women's number rises anyway.

That's the week. In one city, in seven days, the house of labor convenes to decide what work is worth. And the arithmetic underneath Black women's work says 63 cents, 121 years, and a rate that climbed while everybody else's fell.

The table is set. The check is short.

Now, understand what the AFT convention actually is. It is not a conference. It is the floor where a union of 1.875 million members, a number the AFT announced this week, sets its agenda, elects its officers, and decides what it will fight for and what it will trade away. Resolutions pass there. Money moves there. People get elected there. It is one of the few remaining rooms in American life where working people, most of them women and a great many of them Black women, hold institutional power that is real and not ceremonial.

Black women are not visitors in that room. They built a good deal of it. They are the classroom aides and the bus attendants and the school nurses and the paraprofessionals and the teachers who stayed when the funding left. They are also, increasingly, the ones at the front of the hall.

Which brings us to the woman we're featuring this week.

THE PROFILE

Stacy Davis Gates

President, Chicago Teachers Union · President, Illinois Federation of Teachers · Vice President, AFT

Call her by her titles, because she earned every one of them and they stack.

She has led the Chicago Teachers Union since May 2022. One of the loudest, most consequential locals in the country, in a city where the teachers union is not a bystander to politics but a participant in it. In October of last year she added a second: the Illinois Federation of Teachers elected her president, more than 100,000 members statewide, succeeding Dan Montgomery after his fifteen years in the chair. She did not give up Chicago to take Illinois. She holds both.

And she is a vice president of the American Federation of Teachers. A seat at the national table, in the room where the union decides.

This week she walks into that convention hall as one of the most powerful Black women in American labor. Not a guest. Not a speaker they invited for the optics. A vice president of the house.

Say the whole thing, though, because half of it is a lie.

She has that power and the women she represents are still working to July 21. She sits on the national leadership and the gap widened two years running. She can move a state federation and Black women's unemployment climbed in June while the country's fell.

WHY THIS MATTERS FOR US

This is the thing nobody says at the podium: Black women can run the unions outright, and the floor underneath the women they represent still does not move. Her power is real. It is not enough by itself. Both are true, and the second one is not her failure. It's the country's.

That's not a knock on Davis Gates. That's the argument for her. It's the whole reason the bargaining table matters. The only thing that has ever moved wages for Black women in this country is Black women organized, and organized takes a room, and a room takes a union, and a union takes somebody willing to hold two presidencies at once because nobody's coming to do it for her.

She's on that floor right now. Watch what she does with it.

THE FIVE

1. Tuesday is the day.

Black Women's Equal Pay Day, July 21. The arithmetic is up top; we're not running it twice. What to do with it is the part nobody prints. If you sign the checks, pull your own numbers before Tuesday and look at what you're paying the Black women on your payroll against everybody else doing the same job. If you don't sign the checks, ask the person who does. Then forward it to your group chat.

2. The rate went up.

Joint Center's June jobs analysis: Black women's unemployment rose 6.0 to 6.2 percent while Black men's fell 7.3 to 7.0 and the national rate fell to 4.2. Black unemployment overall held at 6.6 percent, highest of any racial group, with 29,000 fewer Black workers employed. Labor force participation dropped to 61.5 percent, lowest since March 2021. The national number improved because people stopped being counted. Ours didn't get that courtesy.

3. TPS: who goes and when.

Today, work authorization ends for Temporary Protected Status holders from Burma, Ethiopia, Somalia, South Sudan, Syria, and Yemen. Haiti's runs one more week, to July 24. That's the longest extension the government gave anybody.

Why: on June 25 the Supreme Court ruled 6-3 in Mullin v. Doe that federal courts can't review most decisions to end TPS. Not that ending it is legal. That judges don't get to look. The injunctions came down, DHS told employers to let people go, and employers started firing ahead of the deadlines.

Haitians are the largest Black population in this fight. What's holding their status is one district court order in Washington. The government's own word for it is limited relief, until the lower courts "align."

Next Friday.

4. Fawn Weaver is out at Uncle Nearest.

She built it in 2016 around Nearest Green, the enslaved man who taught Jack Daniel to make whiskey and whose name the industry spent a century keeping off the bottle. She called herself the People's CEO. Ten years later she doesn't work there.

A court-appointed receiver terminated Fawn Weaver and her husband Keith, the co-founder, effective June 1. Nobody knew until July 10, when receiver Phillip G. Young Jr. filed his fourth quarterly report in federal court in East Tennessee. Farm Credit Mid-America says the company was in default as early as January 2024, sued over more than $100 million in principal, and got the receiver appointed in August 2025. Uncle Nearest is insolvent, carrying north of $200 million in debt. Young expects to notice a sale of the core assets inside 30 to 60 days.

Now be precise, because the internet won't be. Young's report says a forensic investigation could eventually produce claims against the Weavers. Could. No claims have been filed. And every word of that record was filed by somebody on the other side of her: the lender that says she defaulted, and the receiver she fought and lost to, who now runs the company, controls the sale, and writes the only public account of what happened.

Black women are talking about this all week, and not because anybody is shocked that a business failed. Businesses fail constantly. They're talking because none of it adds up, and because the woman who built the thing is not the one telling the story. How does the most celebrated Black-owned spirits company in the country end up insolvent? Who underwrote a hundred-million-dollar loan, on what terms, and what did they know about the risk? What is her side of it, and why has almost nobody printed it?

A Black woman lost the company she built from nothing. Before anybody decides what that means about her, somebody ought to find out what happened.

5. The CDC job nobody has kept.

Dr. Erica Schwartz sat for her confirmation hearing Wednesday in front of the Senate HELP Committee. She is Trump's pick to run the CDC, and she would be the fourth person nominated or confirmed to that job since he took office. The seat has sat empty since August 2025, when he pushed out Susan Monarez.

Her résumé is not the question. Retired rear admiral in the Public Health Service. Former deputy U.S. surgeon general. Chief medical officer of the Coast Guard. An MD from Brown, a master's in public health, a law degree, and close to thirty years in public service. Even people who have spent this administration objecting to its health nominees put her in the qualified column.

What the senators kept circling was whether she will be allowed to do the job. Asked whether she would publicly break with Robert F. Kennedy Jr. over vaccine science, or take down the CDC page linking autism to vaccines, she declined to say. She said she would have hard conversations with him the way she had them with superiors in the military. She also said this, flat: "I will never betray science."

Watch what that promise costs her. A Black woman with thirty years of credentials is being handed an agency that has lost its director, its staff, and its standing, and asked to rebuild all three while reporting to the man whose positions emptied it out. If it works, the agency gets the credit. If it doesn't, her name is the one on it.

THE WIN

Team Coop and Team Spoon

Cynthia Cooper and Teresa Weatherspoon after drafting their All-Star rosters

The WNBA turned 30 this season and handed the keys to two women who built it.

Cynthia Cooper and Teresa Weatherspoon, both of them Hall of Famers twice over, Naismith and Women's Basketball, were named honorary general managers of the All-Star Game. Not honored at halftime. Not walked out for a plaque. Given the rosters. On Wednesday afternoon they sat down on ESPN and drafted all 22 All-Stars themselves, straight through, no regard to conference or position.

Cooper won the coin flip and took Paige Bueckers, the league's top vote-getter. Weatherspoon got the first pick and took A'ja Wilson. Cooper came back with Breanna Stewart. Then Cooper opened the reserves by taking Angel Reese, off Weatherspoon, who coached Reese in Chicago. Weatherspoon turned around and took Reese's Atlanta teammates Rhyne Howard and Allisha Gray. Cooper built a team of twelve players from twelve different franchises. Becky Hammon coaches hers. Cheryl Reeve coaches Weatherspoon's.

Cooper: four championships in Houston, four Finals MVPs, two league MVPs, three scoring titles. Weatherspoon, T-Spoon, five-time All-Star, four-time All-WNBA, two-time Defensive Player of the Year, eight seasons, most of them in New York.

The teams carry their names. Team Coop. Team Spoon. Thirty years after they made the league worth watching, the league put its birthday in their hands.

July 25, the United Center, Chicago, 8:30 on ABC. The skills events are the night before at Wintrust.

THE WATCH

The seat nobody planned to fill

Lindsey Graham died Saturday night. Seventy-one, a brief and sudden illness. By Tuesday afternoon the seat was filled.

Governor Henry McMaster appointed Darline Graham Nordone, Graham's sister, and Chuck Grassley swore her in on the Senate floor. She is the first woman ever to represent South Carolina in the United States Senate. Two hundred thirty-six years, and it took seventy-two hours. Debbie Walsh at Rutgers' Center for American Women and Politics named the mechanism plainly: this is the widow succession model, the way a great many women first reached Congress in this country. Not by running, but by being the closest available relative of a man who died. Nordone holds the seat until January 3, 2027.

Whether she's on the November ballot is a separate question, and it isn't answered yet. Graham had already won June's Republican primary and was on the November ballot when he died, so under state law the party now runs a fast-tracked special primary to pick a new nominee. As of this morning, filing hasn't even opened. It opens at noon Tuesday and closes at noon the following Tuesday, July 28. The special Republican primary is August 11, with a runoff August 25 if nobody clears fifty. Whoever survives goes on the November 3 ballot. Nordone can file like anyone else. The appointment doesn't hand her the nomination, and it doesn't bar her from seeking it either.

What doesn't change either way: Dr. Annie Andrews, the Charleston pediatrician, is the Democratic nominee. She won her primary on June 9 with 61.5 percent and she's already on the ballot. Democrats have their candidate. Republicans have three weeks and a scramble.

Here's why we're watching. South Carolina is roughly a quarter Black, seventh-highest share in the country, and it was majority-Black until 1930. But population isn't the story. Black voters are about 60 percent of this state's Democratic primary electorate. A majority. This is the firewall. The state where Black voters, Black women first, resurrected a presidential campaign that was dead on its feet in 2020.

No Democrat has won a Senate seat here since Fritz Hollings in 1998, and the handicappers still call it solid Republican. That math is real. But if anything moves in South Carolina this November, it moves because Black women decided it would. It always has.

Two websites went up last night

The President spoke for nearly half an hour. He opened on his own record and eventually got to elections. Some networks didn't carry it. The speech isn't the story. The addresses are.

The White House posted whitehouse.gov/election-integrity, a document dump built on the claim that China took 220 million American voter files. Reporters who read the files found largely public information. Voter records are for sale in most states. North Carolina puts its own online. He closed by demanding Congress pass the SAVE America Act: voter ID, documentary proof of citizenship.

Watch that pivot. He didn't say Detroit. He didn't say Philadelphia. He said Beijing. Same bill. Same burden. Better costume. Proof of citizenship does not stop a foreign government. It stops the woman born at home in Alabama in 1948 whose birth this country never wrote down.

The second address is the one that should stop you. civilrights.justice.gov/electionintegrity. That is where you go to report that somebody discriminated against you. That division exists because Black people demanded a federal instrument to enforce the right to vote and won one in 1957. We built that. We used it.

It now carries the President's photograph and a button that says Report an Election Issue, over a news rail of Justice suing state after state for their voter rolls and Homeland Security announcing ICE arrests of voters.

On July 10, DHS ruled that states must adopt its election measures before they receive federal election funds. Courts blocked the President's election orders because a President does not write election law. So he is buying what he could not order.

Watch whether any state folds before November. Watch which ones.

We are digging into this one. Standalone bulletin this weekend. Look for it.

Also on the watch: The 117th NAACP Convention opens tomorrow at McCormick Place in Chicago, July 18-22, under the theme "We, The People." We'll be back on it next week.

ONE THING TO READ

The 19th. "For Black women hit by anti-DEI backlash, this election is personal," by Errin Haines, editor-at-large.

Kecia Ellick spent decades building a career in public health research. Political backlash took it. Now she's in Atlanta trying to rebuild, and she's voting for Keisha Lance Bottoms, a woman she's never met, who could become the first Black woman governor in America, because she recognizes something in her. Not the résumé. The dismissal. Two Black women in their fifties, both qualified past the point of argument, both told it doesn't count.

This issue put a number on what Black women's work is worth. Sixty-three cents. Ellick is what happens when the answer is nothing at all. She isn't in the 6.2 percent, because she isn't counted as looking.

Read it, then read the wage gap again.

Stay rooted.

- LD

Want it delivered straight to your inbox?
Subscribe at www.BlackLadyNews.info

Instagram · @blackladynews | Facebook · /BlackLadyNews

View this issue in your browser

Black Lady News · Issue 012 · July 2026

You're receiving this because you subscribed to Black Lady News.

*|HTML:LIST_ADDRESS_HTML|*