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. 013

Friday, July 24, 2026

A NOTE FROM LEAH

I am writing this from Las Vegas, where I am speaking at the Boulé.

If you are not AKA, here is what that word means. Every other year the Sorority gathers, thousands of us, to do business. Not a party. A convention. Votes get taken, budgets get passed, and this year a new International President gets installed.

I have been a member of this Sorority long enough to know what it feels like to sit in a room with that many Black women who have decided, together, that they are going to be useful. There is nothing else like it. I have been in a lot of rooms.

So today I am in one room watching Charletta Wilson Jacks take the helm of an organization of 390,000 women. And several time zones away, in another room, the Democratic National Committee's Rules and Bylaws Committee is voting on which states get to go first in 2028. I sit on that committee.

Two rooms. One Friday. Both of them about who gets to decide.

That is more or less the whole newsletter this week. Black women running institutions, and Black women being counted, or not counted, by them.

Let's get into it.

- LD

THE HEADLINE

They Told Us to Get the Degree

Tuesday was Black Women's Equal Pay Day. That is the day a Black woman finally catches up to what a white man earned the year before. Not this year. Last year. She works all of 2025, then most of another seven months into 2026, just to pull even with what he already had banked on New Year's Eve.

The day landed on July 21 this year. Last year it came eleven days earlier. The year before, earlier still.

The date is not a holiday. It is a measurement. And it is moving the wrong way.

The floor underneath it did not move. Black women working full-time, year-round earn less than 65 cents for every dollar paid to white non-Hispanic men. Count all workers, including part-time and part-year, and it drops to just under 63 cents.

Now here is the part I want you to sit with, because it takes apart the thing we were all told.

Go get the degree. That was the instruction. Our mothers worked doubles for it. Our grandmothers cleaned other people's houses for it. Get the education and the gap closes.

It does not close.

The Institute for Women's Policy Research put numbers on it last week, in an analysis by Comfort Sampong and Miranda Peterson. Among full-time, year-round workers holding a bachelor's degree, Black women earn a median $61,404. White men with the same degree earn $98,409. Same credential. Same full-time, year-round work. Thirty-seven thousand dollars apart.

And it goes further than that. A Black woman has to hold a bachelor's degree before she out-earns a white man whose education stopped at a high school diploma.

Read that again. Four years. The tuition. The loans she is still paying. All of it, to arrive at the wage of a man who finished twelfth grade and went to work.

Then there is the finding that should end the conversation. The widest earnings gap of any education level is not at the bottom. It is at the top. Black women with professional degrees, the JDs and the MDs, the ones who did every single thing right, carry the largest gap of all.

Look at what that means in dollars. A Black woman with a professional degree earns a median $97,538. With a doctorate, $99,000. Basically the same. Now the white men: a professional degree pays them about $34,000 a year more than a doctorate does. The ladder keeps going for them. For us it flattens out and stops.

AT EVERY LEVEL

"Black women have been getting more degrees and are still making a fraction of what they deserve, at every level."

Dr. Jamila K. Taylor, President and CEO, Institute for Women's Policy Research

At every level. That is the sentence.

The younger women hit the same wall earlier. A second IWPR fact sheet, by Dr. Mrinmoyee Chatterjee, Dr. Jennifer Turner and Salma Elakbawy, found young Black women's unemployment peaked at 19 percent last August. Nearly one in five. And when Black women lost work they stayed out longer: a median of 19 weeks before finding a job in December, against 9 weeks for white women.

The researchers checked every excuse. More young Black women entering the labor market? That share has been falling for a decade. Less educated? Attainment held steady. Stuck in dying industries? Health care and professional services are where the openings are, and that is exactly where Black women work.

At every education level, Black unemployment ran higher than white unemployment. And it rose in 2025.

None of this is news to the women living it. On that same Tuesday, the Black Women's Roundtable released its 10th Annual Power of the Sister Vote poll, and Melanie Campbell's read of it was that education offers limited protection. The degree-holders in that survey reported more strain, not less. More pay discrimination, not less. More exposure when the DEI cuts came down, not less. (More from that poll below.)

So the survey and the wage data arrived the same day, from two directions, saying the same thing.

The degree was never the problem. The degree was never going to be the fix either, because the thing standing between a Black woman and her money was never her transcript.

THE PROFILE

Charletta Wilson Jacks

Photo: Alpha Kappa Alpha Sorority, Inc.

Today in Las Vegas, Charletta Wilson Jacks becomes the International President of Alpha Kappa Alpha Sorority, Incorporated.

The numbers first, because people underestimate them. AKA was founded January 15, 1908, at Howard University, the first sorority established by Black college women. It now has 390,000 members across 12 countries. That is not a club. That is a standing army of women with graduate degrees, mortgages, voter files, and each other's phone numbers.

Jacks comes to it from the inside of government, not the outside.

Howard for her bachelor's. Clark Atlanta for her master's in public administration. Then twenty-one years working for the City of Atlanta, which is the part of her resume I would underline. She was Zoning Administrator. She was Planning Director. She was Deputy Director of Government Affairs under Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms.

Zoning and planning. Say it plainly: she spent two decades on who gets to build what, and where, and who gets moved out of the way for it. In a Black city. Those are not ceremonial jobs. Those are where the map of a place gets drawn, where somebody decides whether the grocery store or the warehouse goes on the corner your grandmother lives on.

She came up through the Sorority the long way too, most recently as International First Vice President. Her home chapter is Lambda Epsilon Omega in Decatur, Georgia.

Here is why this matters beyond the pink and green.

The Divine Nine are among the last Black institutions in this country that nobody else funds, nobody else governs, and nobody else can dismantle by executive order. When a corporation kills its diversity program, it does not touch AKA. These organizations were built during Jim Crow precisely because Black people understood that any institution you do not own can be taken from you.

A lesson that has aged into relevance again this year.

Jacks now runs one of them. Not a symbolic post. A membership organization with chapters in twelve countries, a budget, a service agenda, and the ability to move a lot of women in one direction at once. In a year when Black women are being pushed out of federal jobs, out of DEI offices, and off of maps, the woman who spent twenty-one years learning how zoning actually works just took charge of 390,000 of us.

Editor's note: Rev. Leah D. Daughtry is a member of Alpha Kappa Alpha Sorority, Incorporated, and is speaking at this year's Boulé. Coverage of the Sorority's work reflects her role as a participant.

THE FIVE

01. Letitia James is not under indictment.

Say it again, because almost nobody printed it the second time.

In October 2025, the Justice Department indicted the Attorney General of New York on bank fraud and false statement charges. Wall to wall coverage. On November 24, the case was dismissed without prejudice. It never went to trial.

DOJ went back for a new indictment. In December, two separate grand juries each declined to indict her. Two. Ordinary people, looking at the government's own evidence, twice said no. That got almost no coverage at all.

The asymmetry is the story. A Black woman's name gets destroyed in public and restored in private. Her words: "I will not bow. I will not break. I will not bend."

She is not the only one. Fani Willis is still disqualified from the Georgia election interference case, with a replacement prosecutor due by November 14. Senator L. Louise Lucas, who architected Virginia's congressional map, had the FBI at her office in May. LaMonica McIver, who is pregnant, is still waiting on the Third Circuit, which heard her appeal June 24. Twenty former members of Congress, seventeen of them Republicans, filed a brief arguing that if her prosecution stands, congressional oversight does not.

Meanwhile the Justice Department built a $1.776 billion fund to pay people it deems victims of government weaponization. A judge froze it in May.

Follow that money, then look at that list of names.

02. What Black women actually asked for.

The Power of the Sister Vote poll asked Black women to rate their priorities. Three issues climbed into the top tier this year that were not there in 2024.

Bringing down healthcare and prescription costs, 91 percent. Protecting voting rights, 90 percent. Reducing Black maternal deaths in childbirth, 89 percent.

Read those three together. Coverage. The vote. Surviving childbirth. In one cycle, Black women pulled their healthcare, their franchise and their survival onto the same list.

Social Security and Medicare took the top spot at 92 percent, up from 89. And "creating good-paying jobs" picked up two words between the 2024 survey and this one. It now reads "good-paying jobs with benefits." Nobody adds two words to a survey item for fun. Somebody lost their benefits.

One caution, because I will not let a number get twisted even in our favor. That list only shows the top eight. Housing, public education and Black history, the crime rate: missing from the 2026 list does not mean Black women stopped caring. It means eight slots could not hold everything that is on fire.

03. The NAACP is spending $20 million to turn out Black voters.

Largest midterm investment in the organization's history, announced on the country's 250th birthday. It targets 6.5 million Black voters across 14 states and 33 congressional districts, with 20,000 volunteers to knock the doors.

They were plain about why. It follows the Supreme Court rulings that gutted the Voting Rights Act and let racial gerrymandering run across the South.

Read that against the item above. Ninety percent of Black women called protecting voting rights a top concern this year, new to the list. The NAACP just put twenty million dollars behind the same sentence.

And know who does this work. Twenty thousand volunteers is not an abstraction. Anybody who has ever run a canvass in a Black neighborhood knows exactly who shows up with the clipboard, the church van, and the sign-in sheet. The money is new. The women are not.

04. Tomorrow is International Afro-Descendant Women's Day.

If you have never heard of it, that is the point.

It started in 1992, when hundreds of Black women from 32 countries across Latin America and the Caribbean gathered in the Dominican Republic. They came to name what they were carrying: racism and patriarchy braided together, and the particular way those two land on a Black woman. They left having built a network that still exists, and having declared the day themselves.

Nobody gave it to them. No international body conferred it. They took a date, put their name on it, and the OAS caught up later.

There are roughly 130 million people of African descent in Latin America. More than half are women. Read that against the 63 cents up top and you see the shape of the thing. It is not an American arrangement. It is a hemispheric one.

So tomorrow, wherever you are: they are marching in Brazil. They are gathering in Los Angeles. It is our day too.

05. What Black women did about it.

Here is the number underneath this whole issue. Between January and August of 2025, Black women lost more than 251,000 jobs.

Not because the economy collapsed. Because the federal workforce was cut, DEI offices were shuttered, and when a company trims it knows whose desk it walks to first. Excluding government entirely, Black women lost jobs at three times the rate of all women in professional and service occupations.

Here is what happened next, and IWPR named it in their own report: Black women pivoted careers, started businesses, and lifted each other up in community.

Businesses. Plural. Enough that the researchers writing up the damage stopped to write up the response.

I will not make that pretty. Nobody should have to incorporate an LLC because her job was eliminated for political theater, and necessity is not the same as opportunity.

But say plainly what these women did when the door closed. They went and built another door.

THE WIN

Two Black women are up for the same Daytime Emmy. That has never happened before.

Tamara Tunie and Karla Mosley, who play mother and daughter on Beyond the Gates, are both nominated for Outstanding Lead Actress. Until now, only two Black women had ever been nominated in that category: Debbi Morgan, and Mishael Morgan, who won. Tunie and Mosley doubled the list in a single morning.

But here is the part worth sitting with.

One of the NAACP's earliest national campaigns, in 1915, was against a movie. They understood before almost anybody that the picture this country draws of us does political work. They organized nationwide to stop it.

They lost. The film played 360 times in Boston alone, and was the first movie ever screened inside the White House.

For the century after, they fought that fight from the outside. They protested. They litigated. They handed out Image Awards to honor what other people had made.

In 2020, they went into business with CBS Studios and started producing television themselves. Beyond the Gates is the first thing that venture made. Michele Val Jean created it, writes it, and runs it. Sheila Ducksworth runs the venture. Derrick Johnson and Leon W. Russell carry executive producer credits, which means the president and the board chair of the NAACP have their names on a soap opera.

Fifteen nominations in its first year of eligibility. Six of seven acting nods went to Black performers.

An organization that spent a century objecting to the story went and made one.

Call them by their names.

THE WATCH

The 2028 calendar. Today, the Democratic National Committee's Rules and Bylaws Committee votes on which states go first in 2028.

Not a hearing. Not a recommendation. The vote. Twelve states made the case: Delaware, Georgia, Illinois, Iowa, Michigan, Nevada, New Hampshire, New Mexico, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, Virginia. Four or five come out with a slot, one per region.

Two have emerged as the front-runners for the first position: Nevada and South Carolina. Here is the part worth knowing. Both of those state parties are chaired by a Black woman, and both of those women sit on the committee taking the vote.

Christale Spain has chaired the South Carolina Democratic Party since 2023, the first Black woman to hold the office. Daniele Monroe-Moreno chairs the Nevada Democratic Party, the first Black person to chair it. They are friends. Today they are on opposite sides of the same question, and each of them has a vote on it.

Watch the South slot too. South Carolina, Georgia, North Carolina, Tennessee and Virginia are all in that pool, and every one of them runs through Black voters. Whichever state lands there sets who gets asked first, who gets courted, and whose concerns become the questions candidates have to answer before the field narrows.

Whatever comes out of this room goes to the full DNC for ratification at its Summer Meeting, August 12 through 15.

A note: I serve on the DNC Rules & Bylaws Committee. I am speaking at the AKA Boulé today and will not be in the room for this vote, but my proxy vote will be. Just FYI.

South Carolina, the other race. Darline Graham Nordone, appointed to her late brother's Senate seat, announced Tuesday she will seek the full six-year term with Trump's endorsement. The special Republican primary is August 11, against Russell Fry, Ralph Norman, Mark Lynch and Duke Buckner. The winner meets Dr. Annie Andrews in November.

And note one rule. Voters who cast a ballot in June's Democratic primary are barred from voting August 11. A good number of the Black voters who turned out this summer have no say in who replaces Lindsey Graham on the ballot.

Nashville. The National Urban League Conference opens July 29. The 50th State of Black America report drops at the opening plenary. Full coverage next week.

ONE THING TO READ

The Black Women's Roundtable's 10th Annual Power of the Sister Vote poll, out Tuesday on Black Women's Equal Pay Day. I pulled from it up top. But it's worth your while to read the whole poll. Ten years of the National Coalition on Black Civic Participation asking Black women directly, not as a crosstab in someone else's survey. Read what we did not have room for: what they said about their households, about their concerns, and what they still believe is possible. It is the rare document where we are the entire sample.

READ THE FULL POLL

Stay rooted.

- LD

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Black Lady News · Issue 013 · July 2026

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