More determined. Less hopeful.
- A WEEKLY NOTE FROM LEAH DAUGHTRY -
Black
Lady
News
What matters this week.
For the women who move the world.
Issue No. 015
Friday, August 7, 2026
A NOTE FROM LEAH
Sixty-one years ago this week, a president signed a law that was supposed to settle something. This week, a Supreme Court decision is testing how much of it actually held.
I keep coming back to one thing as I built this issue: the country asked Black women what they think, and then, four days later, showed us exactly what it does with the answer. The survey says we're more determined to vote than we've been in years, and less hopeful than we've been in years, both at the same time. Then Missouri and Michigan handed us two real-time case studies in what that determination is up against. Money. Redrawn maps. A candidate who has to earn a coalition rather than assume one.
None of that surprised the sisters who filled out that survey. It's exactly what they told the pollsters to expect.
So this issue moves the way the week moved. The Urban League's 50th anniversary report on what a slower economy costs us in real dollars. A boardroom door that's closing faster than it's opening. A mail ballot fight sitting on one justice's desk. A CDC confirmation that answers one question and opens ten more. And in the middle of it, Dr. Zinga Fraser, spending her career making sure the last fifty years of Black women in politics don't get written out of the next fifty.
We end on seven names. Seven Black women running institutions that move trillions of dollars. Say their names, and then go vote like your name is on the ballot too, because in every way that matters, it is.
Let's get into it.
THE HEADLINE
Embargoed content released Aug. 6, the 61st anniversary of the Voting Rights Act.
They told us what they're up against. Then the country proved it.
The Black Women's Roundtable's newest Power of the Sister Vote survey landed this week, the same week as one of the most closely watched primary nights of this cycle, five states, dozens of races, and the numbers explain exactly what we watched happen.
Start with Missouri. Cori Bush lost her comeback bid in the St. Louis primary, again, to Rep. Wesley Bell, again backed by millions in outside spending from AIPAC's super PAC. A hundred miles west, Rep. Emanuel Cleaver heads into November in a district Missouri Republicans redrew to stretch nearly 200 miles east, turning his once-safe Kansas City seat into one of the Republican Party's top targets nationally. Eighty-six percent of Black women say Black candidates have a harder time raising money than white women or men. Eighty-four percent say attacks on Black women's leadership are increasing. Last night, both showed up in real time.
And 85 percent of Black women are concerned about the Supreme Court weakening the Voting Rights Act, 65 percent very concerned. That is not abstract anxiety. That is Cleaver's map.
Now Michigan, the marquee race of the night. Michigan's Senate primary became the most expensive Democratic primary in U.S. history, and the state's Black voters, concentrated in Wayne County and Detroit, backed Haley Stevens. She carried Wayne County 50.8% to 46%. That wasn't necessarily a message failure on Abdul El-Sayed's part so much as a familiarity and viability calculation: Stevens had spent months campaigning in Detroit's Black communities, she carried real institutional relationships built over four terms in Congress, and Michigan-based Black voters weighing who could actually beat Mike Rogers in November leaned toward the candidate with the longer track record. The Michigan Council of Church of God in Christ Bishops endorsed her, alongside Gov. Gretchen Whitmer and retiring Sen. Gary Peters.
El-Sayed still won the state by one point, carrying it on the strength of younger and more progressive voters, including younger Black voters who supported his campaign, along with the Council of Baptist Pastors of Detroit and Vicinity and the United Auto Workers. It was a real, contested choice within the Black electorate, not a single verdict, and not one that breaks along a tidy establishment-versus-insurgent line.
The needle for November: El-Sayed now needs the voters who chose Stevens, especially in Wayne County, to turn out for him against Rogers. The survey gives a real signal on that, not a guess. Strong Democratic identification among Black women jumped 17 points since 2024, to 57 percent. Seventy-eight percent back the generic Democratic candidate over the Republican. Fifty-eight percent see the Republican Party as undermining democracy, sixty percent say it tries to steal elections. That's not enthusiasm for El-Sayed specifically. It's a level of consolidation against the alternative that tends to hold in November even after a divided primary.
WHY THIS MATTERS FOR US
Consolidation is not the same as a guarantee. Black voters in Wayne County chose the other candidate three days ago. Their support in November is not owed to anyone, it has to be earned, and that means real courting, real presence, real inclusion in the campaign's strategy, not just a general-election pivot and an assumption that the alternative will do the work. Based on Tuesday's results, the El-Sayed campaign has work to do.
Here's the part that should stop you. Sixty-nine percent of Black women say they will definitely vote in November, up 13 points since 2024. Sixty-seven percent are extremely motivated, up 20 points. Hope, meanwhile, dropped from 43 percent to 28. Read that again. More determined. Less hopeful. Both at once.
That is the whole story of this survey, and it is the whole story of this week's elections. The money problem is real. The attacks are real. The redrawn maps are real. Affordability moves votes further than anything else. And Black voters, in every one of these races, made their own choices, choices that candidates and parties cannot assume and cannot take for granted. Black women are not confused about any of it. They are voting anyway.
Let's say what this is. Eighty-seven percent of Black women say more of them are running for office than ever. Last night showed exactly what that costs, exactly what it takes to earn Black voters' support, and exactly what's still winnable in November.
LEARN MORE. The Root, on the full Power of the Sister Vote survey · ABC News, on all five states' primary results
THE FIVE
01
The Boardroom Retreat
New data from Spencer Stuart, out this week, adds a second data point to the anti-DEI thread already running through the Urban League's report. Black directors made up just 4% of new S&P 500 board appointments this year. That's half of what it was a decade ago.
Zoom out and it gets worse. Boards added the fewest new directors in ten years, and of the people who did get seats, only 40% were women or people of color. That's the lowest that number has been since 2014.
Here's the tell on why. Boards are recruiting sitting and former CEOs at the highest rate in 15 years, and that pool skews white and male. Only 12% of S&P 500 companies still publicly disclose an inclusion policy. In 2025, that number was 58%.
Let's say what this is. This is not boards running out of qualified Black candidates. This is boards choosing not to look.
LEARN MORE. AfroTech, on the 2026 Spencer Stuart Board Index
02
The Mail Ballot Fight Nobody's Decided Yet
Two emergency dockets, Trump v. California and Alabama v. California, are fully briefed and sitting with Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson. The states filed their response Aug. 3. No ruling yet, and the Postal Service itself has told the courts it's running out of time to implement Trump's changes before November regardless of how this goes. This is the legal fight underneath the survey's top voter suppression fear, mail ballots being rejected or delayed, at 36%. Watching for a ruling before Issue 016.
LEARN MORE. SCOTUSblog, case file and docket
03
The CDC Job Nobody Has Kept: Update
Back in Issue 012, we told you Dr. Erica Schwartz was up for CDC director, the fourth person tapped for that job since Trump took office. The seat had been empty since he pushed out Susan Monarez in August 2025.
The Senate confirmed her Wednesday, 51 to 44, on a party line vote. The lone crossover was Sen. Tim Kaine of Virginia, the only Democrat who backed her.
Nothing about the frame has changed. She is qualified. Decades in public health, a resume even critics of this administration respect. She is also walking into an agency that lost offices focused on maternal health monitoring under the man she now reports to.
We said it in July and we're saying it again. If this works, the agency gets the credit. If it doesn't, her name is the one on it.
LEARN MORE. NPR, on the confirmation vote
04
Something to Watch: The Vote That Could Decide Mail-Order Abortion Access
Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche told a room of faith leaders something he did not tell the Senate. On a private call hosted by the White House Faith Office, he said the Justice Department is putting practices and policies in place to stop abortion pills from being mailed into states that ban them. He told the room the Dobbs decision would become permanent in every single state. That is a far bigger promise than what he gave senators at his own confirmation hearing.
Here is where it stands. The floor vote is set for Friday. The final confirmation vote follows Saturday. Blanche can lose only two Republicans and still win, given the 53 to 47 majority and Mitch McConnell's ongoing absence. Susan Collins, Lisa Murkowski, and Bill Cassidy have not said which way they are going.
Why this belongs in your feed: mail delivery of mifepristone has been the workaround that kept abortion access reachable for a lot of Black women in banned and restricted states since Dobbs, especially where travel, time off work, and insurance were already the barrier. We are watching the vote count, not the outcome. Check back next week.
LEARN MORE. Politico, on the private call
THE PROFILE
Credit: Courtesy of Zinga Fraser, via zingafraser.com
Zinga Fraser
If you want to understand why "whose history gets told" is such a live fight right now, talk to the person who has spent two decades making sure Shirley Chisholm's isn't lost.
Dr. Zinga Fraser directs the Shirley Chisholm Project on Brooklyn Women's Activism at Brooklyn College, where she's built an archive tracing Black women's grassroots organizing in Brooklyn back to 1945. She is one of the foremost scholars on Chisholm, on Barbara Jordan, and on Black congressional women more broadly, work that reads less like history and more like a user's manual right now.
Her forthcoming book, Sister Insider/Sister Outsider, puts Chisholm and Jordan side by side, two Black congresswomen who entered politics within a few years of each other in the early 1970s and built radically different theories of power. Chisholm ran for president unbought and unbossed. Jordan built coalitions from inside the institution. Fraser's argument is that both were doing the same work, expanding who counts as powerful, just from different angles.
That argument lands differently this year. The country just marked its 250th anniversary, and the fight over which version of that history gets taught, funded, and remembered is not subtle. Eighty-one percent of Black women in this week's survey said protecting the teaching of Black history in schools is a top priority. That is not abstract for Fraser. It is the job.
Fifty years on, the woman who said she wanted history to remember her not just as the first Black woman elected to Congress, but as a Black woman who lived in the twentieth century and dared to be herself, still has someone making sure that happens.
LEARN MORE. The Shirley Chisholm Project, Brooklyn College
THE WIN
Seven
Seven Black women now sit at the helm of major companies managing trillions of dollars. Thasunda Brown Duckett leads TIAA. Mellody Hobson leads Ariel Investments. Mpumi Madisa and Mary Vilakazi lead major South African financial and mining institutions. Latriece Watkins leads merchandising at Walmart. Karen Carter takes over as CEO of Dow this month. Joi Harris leads DTE Energy, one of Michigan's largest utilities.
This is not one woman breaking a ceiling. This is seven, running institutions that touch retirement savings, energy grids, global supply chains, and investment portfolios worth trillions.
Say their names. All seven.
ONE THING TO READ
The State of Black America, 50th Edition
This is the biggest must-read of the week, and it landed the same week the country marked 250 years, with a question built into its own subtitle: is the American Dream dead. The National Urban League turns 50 editions deep into this flagship report, and the timing is not subtle.
Here is what moved for Black women specifically. Between 250,000 and 300,000 Black women lost their jobs in 2025, and 567,000 Black men between November and February. Black unemployment climbed to 7.8%, up from a historic low of 4.7% in 2023.
THE NUMBER
$87 billion in lost Black household income. That is not a statistic. That is rent, groceries, and tuition that didn't get paid.
The report does not stop at the damage. It organizes its findings around three imperatives: Defeat Poverty, Defend Democracy, and Demand Diversity. It names AI, clean energy, and biomedical innovation as the next real pathways to economic power, if Black workers get equitable access to them. Note the if. Access is the whole fight. It also calls for stronger voting rights protections, real investment in HBCUs, backing for Black entrepreneurs, and a hard no to the anti-DEI rollback.
Urban League President Marc Morial has been blunt that the American Dream, while not dead, is further from reach for Black Americans than at any point since the Civil Rights Movement. Put plainly: jobs, AI, education, and civil rights are one story here, not four separate ones.
Read it. Forward it to your group chat. Pull a stat for your next meeting.
A note on precision: the men's job-loss figure (567,000) covers November 2025 through February 2026, sourced to BLS data via FRED. The women's figure (250,000 to 300,000) is a full calendar-year 2025 figure. Some secondary coverage collapses both into a single window; we're keeping the two timeframes distinct here because the underlying report does.
READ AT: stateofblackamerica.org
Stay rooted.
- LD
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