Same ground. Same fight, different decade.
— A WEEKLY NOTE FROM LEAH DAUGHTRY —
Black
Lady
News
What matters this week.
For the women who move the world.
Issue No. 018
Friday, August 28, 2026
A NOTE FROM LEAH
Today, while you're reading this, tens of thousands of people are standing at the Lincoln Memorial for the 63rd anniversary of the March on Washington. This year's theme is Defend the Vote. And this week, that is the news.
The rules for how you vote by mail changed twice this week, and by the time you read this they may have changed again. A congresswoman spent her Thursday in federal court defending a name change she already won once. A member of Congress got a ruling that keeps her facing trial while she is pregnant. A columnist got her job back because a union and an arbitrator said the paperwork mattered more than the politics.
None of this is unrelated. It is the same argument, over and over, in different rooms: who gets to be counted, who gets to keep what they earned, who gets to keep their job for saying what's true. Sixty-two years ago this week, Fannie Lou Hamer made that argument on live television. It still needs making.
Forward it to your group chat. Pull a line for your next meeting.
Let's get into it.
THE HEADLINE
March on Washington: Defend the Vote
Photo: National Museum of African American History and Culture
Today, tens of thousands gather at the Lincoln Memorial for the 63rd anniversary of the 1963 March on Washington. Co-chaired by the Rev. Al Sharpton, Martin Luther King III, and Arndrea Waters King, this year's pillars are voting rights, economic dignity, and affordability.
Same ground. Same fight. Different decade.
THE WATCH
The mail-ballot rule: what actually happened
The mail-ballot rule is blocked again, and this time a Black sorority helped make it happen. On Monday, the Supreme Court lifted the injunction covering the 23-state coalition. On Wednesday, the same judge who'd separately blocked USPS nationwide, Indira Talwani, an Obama appointee, vacated her own order too, saying she was "compelled" by the Supreme Court's ruling, not persuaded by it. Voting rights groups amended their complaint within hours to target the newly finalized rule directly. Last night, the court granted their request: a 14-day emergency order blocking USPS from implementing the rule, siding with a coalition that includes Delta Sigma Theta Sorority, Inc., alongside the League of Women Voters, the ACLU, and the Brennan Center. The court didn't mince words: there's still no evidence of the fraud USPS claims to be solving, and the risk of disenfranchising voters "dwarfs" whatever interest USPS has in the rule. The reprieve is temporary. A hearing on a longer-term injunction is set for September 3.
Where things stand at publish: a new 14-day TRO blocks the rule. Watch September 3.
THE FIVE
01 LaMonica McIver's case survives, mostly against her.
A divided 3rd Circuit panel ruled 2-1 on August 26 that McIver's oversight visit to Delaney Hall was protected by the Speech or Debate Clause, but her physical involvement in Mayor Ras Baraka's arrest was not. Two of three counts stand. One goes back down to the district court for another look. "The point of it all is cruelty," she said back in June. "The process is the pain for them." Two months later, the process is still going.
3rd Circuit Court of Appeals · New Jersey Monitor
02 Nicole Pollard elected AFSCME Secretary-Treasurer.
Nicole Pollard was elected AFSCME International Secretary-Treasurer at the union's 47th International Convention in Chicago, becoming the first Black woman to hold the role. She spent 23 years as an AFSCME member, most recently as International Executive Assistant to former President Lee Saunders. Her election closes the succession story Issue 016 opened, when both Saunders and Elissa McBride announced they were stepping down.
AFSCME
03 Joyce Beatty vs. the Kennedy Center.
Rep. Joyce Beatty already won the fight to strip Trump's name off the Kennedy Center's facade. Yesterday she was back in court asking a judge to stop the board from putting it back on. Judge Christopher Cooper didn't rule after a nearly two-hour hearing, but got the board to agree to hold off until September 8. Trump's team had floated in a filing that the building might need to come down if they don't get their way. Beatty's lawyers called it what it is: "a breathtaking assault on the rule of law."
U.S. District Court, D.D.C. · CBS News
04 H.R.1 didn't just cut healthcare spending. It cut Black maternity healthcare.
Medicaid finances about 4 in 10 births nationally, but for Black mothers that number is closer to 64%. Black Americans make up roughly 21% of Medicaid enrollees despite being about 13% of the population, and that share runs even higher across the Deep South. SPLC counts 16 rural hospital closures across its five focus states this year. That's not a regional inconvenience. It's a maternal care desert getting wider, in the states where Black women already have the least OB-GYN access in the country.
SPLC · KFF · CDC NCHS
05 The overlooked growth engine.
MIT researchers found the average age of founders behind the fastest-growing new ventures is 45, not 25. Women over 50 bring exactly what investors say they want: industry knowledge, real networks, decades of judgment. Wells Fargo's 2026 Impact of Women-Owned Businesses report found Black women-owned employer firms now average $650,000 in revenue, the lowest of any group, and down sharply from over $1 million the year before. Business formation keeps climbing while revenue falls, tracking almost exactly with the wave of Black women pushed out of W2 jobs over the same stretch.
MIT · Wells Fargo 2026 Impact of Women-Owned Businesses Report
THE WIN
Karen Attiah goes back to work.
Some weeks the Win is a title. This week it's a ruling.
An independent arbitrator ordered The Washington Post on Monday to reinstate opinion columnist Karen Attiah, with back pay and lost benefits, finding that the paper violated its own labor agreement when it fired her last September. Attiah was let go over social media posts she made in the hours after Charlie Kirk's assassination, posts the Post called "gross misconduct." The arbitrator didn't buy it: the paper never proved the posts rose to that level, and never had "good and sufficient cause" to fire her at all.
The context that matters
Attiah was the Post's last full-time Black opinion columnist. She'd been there since 2014, founded the paper's Global Opinions section, won a Polk Award, and was NABJ's Journalist of the Year in 2019. She's also the editor who recruited Jamal Khashoggi to write for the Post before his murder in 2018. This is not a junior staffer caught in a policy dispute.
The pattern
Attiah's case sits next to a beat this publication has tracked all year: Rachel Scott, April Ryan, Yamiche Alcindor, Abby Phillip. Black women reporters and columnists getting disciplined, frozen out, or pushed out for doing the job in front of them. Most of those fights are still open. This one has a ruling attached, and the ruling went her way.
THE PROFILE
Shelly Cayette-Weston builds power in the NBA's front office
Photo: NBA.com
WHO Shelly Cayette-Weston
WHAT President of Business Operations, Hornets Sports & Entertainment
FIRST First Black woman to hold a Chief Commercial Officer title in the NBA
Shelly Cayette-Weston is President of Business Operations for the NBA's Hornets Sports & Entertainment, and she got there by building the receipts first. Before Charlotte, she spent 12 years with the Cleveland Cavaliers, the last two as Executive Vice President and Chief Commercial Officer, becoming the first Black woman to hold a CCO title anywhere in the NBA.
Now she oversees business operations for the entire Hornets Sports & Entertainment portfolio: the Charlotte Hornets, the Greensboro Swarm, and a newly renovated Spectrum Center booking more than 125 events a year. She started her NBA career with the original New Orleans Hornets, in her hometown, working marketing and community investment. Nearly two decades later, she's running the building.
ONE THING TO READ
Sixty-two years later.
Photo: Wikipedia
August 22 marked 62 years since Fannie Lou Hamer stood before the Credentials Committee at the 1964 Democratic National Convention in Atlantic City and told the country, on live television, why an all-white Mississippi delegation had no business being seated. A sharecropper from Ruleville, she had been evicted for trying to register to vote and beaten half to death in a Winona jail cell for it. She testified anyway.
This week's recommendation is Keisha N. Blain's Until I Am Free: Fannie Lou Hamer's Enduring Message to America (Beacon Press). Blain, a historian at Brown, does not treat Hamer as a monument. She treats her as a political thinker whose analysis of who gets to vote, who gets counted, and who gets to sit in the room still applies. That is not a stretch this week. It is the news.
Read it alongside this issue's March on Washington headline and the mail-ballot Watch item. The fight in 1964 was over a seat at the table. The fight today is over who gets a ballot at all. Same argument, different paperwork.
Learn more: beacon.org/Until-I-Am-Free
Stay rooted.
— LD
Black Lady News is a weekly curation by Leah Daughtry.
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