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. 021

Friday, September 18, 2026

A NOTE FROM LEAH

This week in Washington, thousands of people have been gathering for the Congressional Black Caucus' 55th Annual Legislative Weekend. Policy wonks, non-profit executives, political strategists, elected officials, organizers, activists, and more come together to discuss the issues facing our country and our communities. The policy interests and expertise of the 62 members of the Congressional Black Caucus were on full display in the workshops, seminars, and town hall meetings jam packed into the week.

This against the backdrop of assaults on our freedoms, our voting rights, and our leadership.

I was in the room this week when Robin Kelly announced her successors. It was the Congressional Caucus on Black Women and Girls, ten years old this year, naming three new co-chairs to carry the work forward as two of its founders head out the door. One retiring after a Senate bid that didn't land. One retiring as part of a wave that's thinning the whole Caucus. I sat there thinking about how often we've had to do this: hand off the work mid-fight, build the next bench while the last one is still walking out.

That's the week, in miniature. Congress went home and won't be back until after the election. The redistricting maps are already trying to draw some of these seats out of existence before anyone even votes. And still: a courtroom told a president no, twice in one day. Voters kept registering by the thousands. Amy Sherald is on the cover of Time. None of it cancels the other. All of it is true at once. That's usually how the work actually moves.

THE HEADLINE

Mike Johnson sent the House home. It won't reconvene until after Election Day.

Speaker Mike Johnson adjourned the House this week, sending members home to campaign. The chamber isn't expected back in Washington until after the November 3 midterms. That leaves a stack of unfinished business frozen in place for the next seven weeks, and the fallout isn't evenly distributed. Here's what it specifically means for Black women and girls.

Maternal health

The Momnibus goes back into limbo, again. This will be at least the fourth Congress in which the maternal health package hasn't passed as a whole, following stalled attempts in 2020, 2021, and 2023. That matters directly: Black women are three to four times more likely to die from pregnancy-related causes than white women, regardless of income or education. Every recess without action means that funding keeps depending on appropriations riders instead of durable law.

Voting rights

No House floor action on the John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act means no restoration of Section 5 preclearance review, the mechanism designed to ensure Black and other communities of color have access to the ballot free from discrimination. That's a live issue heading into a midterm where redistricting and voter-ID fights are already underway in several states.

SNAP, nutrition, and Medicaid stability

Black women and girls are disproportionately represented among SNAP and Medicaid recipients. An unresolved Farm Bill and a continuing resolution funding HHS leave both programs vulnerable to whatever gets negotiated, or cut, in December, far from public scrutiny.

DHS and immigration funding

The most contentious of the funding fights, DHS appropriations and ICE funding, remains unresolved against a backdrop of enforcement controversies. Those enforcement patterns disproportionately touch Black immigrant and mixed-status families.

One chamber isn't going dark, though. The Senate remains in session, at least until early October. And Senator Mitch McConnell is back on duty, returning to the Senate this past Monday after a three-month absence following a fall at his D.C. home on June 14 that left him briefly unconscious and led to a hospitalization complicated by pneumonia. His return won't change much on its own, but McConnell chairs both the Senate Appropriations Defense Subcommittee and the Rules Committee. With him back, watch for movement on those two fronts even while the House sits empty.

THE PROFILE

Nicole Austin-Hillery convenes the ALC as the Caucus fights for its seats

This issue lands in the middle of the Congressional Black Caucus Foundation's 55th Annual Legislative Conference. It's the biggest week of the year for the woman running the organization behind it.

Credit: Congressional Black Caucus Foundation

WHO Nicole Austin-Hillery

WHAT President & CEO, Congressional Black Caucus Foundation

SINCE February 2022

THIS WEEK Leading CBCF's 55th Annual Legislative Conference, "Rooted, Ready & Rising," Sept 16-20, Washington, D.C.

Nicole Austin-Hillery has run the Congressional Black Caucus Foundation since February 2022, brought in for a resume built almost entirely in the fight for civil and human rights. Before CBCF, she was Executive Director of the U.S. Program at Human Rights Watch. Before that, she was the first Director and Counsel of the Brennan Center for Justice's Washington office, serving as the Center's chief representative before Congress and the executive branch. She started her legal career as the George N. Lindsay Civil Rights Fellow at the Lawyers' Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, and cut her litigation teeth at Mehri & Skalet on civil rights employment class actions. She holds a JD from Howard University School of Law and a BA from Carnegie Mellon. She is a member of Alpha Kappa Alpha Sorority, Inc.

This ALC convenes in about as fraught a moment as the conference has faced. In April, the Supreme Court's ruling in Louisiana v. Callais weakened Section 2 of the Voting Rights Act, and GOP-controlled legislatures moved fast afterward: new maps in Louisiana, Alabama, South Carolina, Texas, and Mississippi that CBC Chair Yvette Clarke has said could put as many as 19 of the Caucus's 62 members at risk of losing their seats by 2028. Add a wave of retirements on top of that: CBC dean Eleanor Holmes Norton is stepping down after more than three decades representing D.C., alongside Reps. Bonnie Watson Coleman, Danny Davis, Dwight Evans, Mark Veasey, Frederica Wilson, and Cleo Fields. The Caucus gathering for this ALC could look meaningfully smaller by the next one.

What CBCF actually does

Austin-Hillery has framed CBCF around three pillars: a leadership pipeline built on paid internships and fellowships (created, she's noted, because unpaid pipelines only ever produced leaders who could afford to work for free), a scholarly think tank function, and a national convening role for policy strategy. At last year's ALC, facing a proposed 15% cut to federal education funding, she pushed the room past ceremony: "This ALC is not about having good conversation. It's about planning, strategy, and walking out of this building with a clear agenda."

WHY THIS MATTERS FOR US, ESPECIALLY THIS WEEK

Austin-Hillery isn't just running a conference this week. She's convening the Caucus at the exact moment its future size is in question. CBCF's convening power, research arm, and leadership pipeline matter more, not less, when the elected side of Black political power is being redrawn out of existence in state after state. Watch whether the ALC's programming addresses the redistricting fight directly, or treats it as backdrop.

THE FIVE

New chairs, ten years in. The Congressional Caucus on Black Women and Girls named three new co-chairs yesterday: Reps. Shontel Brown (OH), LaMonica McIver (NJ), and Lateefah Simon (CA), who will serve alongside co-founder Yvette Clarke (NY). The change comes as fellow co-founders Reps. Robin Kelly (IL) and Bonnie Watson Coleman (NJ) leave Congress, Kelly after an unsuccessful Senate primary bid, Watson Coleman as part of this year's wave of CBC retirements. The timing carries its own weight: the caucus, founded in 2016 in response to Sandra Bland's death, marks its tenth anniversary this year.
9,000 and counting. National Voter Registration Day landed this week with real numbers behind it: One Million Black Voters Rising held a pep rally for the occasion, and more than 9,000 people registered to attend. It's a sharp counter-note to run alongside the mail-in ballot fight elsewhere in this issue. The same week two federal judges are blocking the administration's attempt to restrict how ballots get counted, organizers on the ground are still doing the work of getting people engaged in the first place. For more information about One Million Black Voters Rising, visit www.1MBVR.org.
Tracking the pattern: an update. Four Black women in public office, each targeted a different way. Letitia James: repeatedly prosecuted since she won her civil fraud case against Trump; her original indictment was tossed on procedural grounds, and two separate grand juries then declined to reindict her. No new attempt has surfaced since, DOJ has gone quiet on the case for months, leaving her the rare Trump target the department couldn't make stick. Louise Lucas: no charges filed, but federal agents have wiretapped her calls, including with a sitting congressman, twice this year, while she leads Virginia's redistricting fight. LaMonica McIver: criminally charged over a congressional oversight visit, making her the only sitting member of Congress under federal indictment; the Third Circuit ruled Aug 26 she can be tried on two of three counts. Fani Willis: subpoenaed for her travel records after she indicted Trump in Georgia, then disqualified from the case she brought, which remains paused.
He lost in court, then lost his temper. Judge Christopher Cooper blocked the Kennedy Center board's plan to inscribe Trump's name on the building and rename the grounds "President Donald J. Trump Plaza." Hours later, Trump called into the board's meeting and, according to Rep. Joyce Beatty, the lawmaker who'd just beaten him in court, called her "dumb," "incompetent," and "obstructionist." Beatty says she told him she knew he was incompetent and reminded him he had "more bankruptcies than anybody in the room." Trump, she says, also threatened to hold her personally responsible if the building's damaged ceiling fell and hurt someone. The same board then voted to immediately close the main building for a $257 million renovation that could keep it dark up to two years. Trump himself said the closing would happen "immediately," but that the renovation "cannot begin" until the courts let his name go back on the building, tying the repair work directly to the naming fight. Beatty argues the closure vote itself defies Cooper's prior order barring shutdown without court approval; Cooper denied her request for an emergency hearing on that question for now, but ruled Thursday that the board must give 30 days' notice before any major physical changes to the building, including demolition.
Zero for ten. Every acting winner at Monday's Primetime Emmys was white: all ten categories, the first shutout like it in five years. Thirteen nominees of color went home empty, including Quinta Brunson and Janelle James of Abbott Elementary (shut out entirely despite seven nominations), Yahya Abdul-Mateen II for the now-cancelled Wonder Man, Sterling K. Brown, Zendaya, and Colman Domingo. Directing told the same story: Salli Richardson-Whitfield became the first woman of any race to earn two Outstanding Directing (Drama) nominations in the same year (for The Gilded Age and Task), on top of already being the first Black woman ever nominated in the category. She lost both. Black wins did happen the weekend before, at the smaller, non-televised Creative Arts Emmys: choreographer Charm La'Donna, animator Uzoma Dunkwu, producer Adrien Beard. None of it reached Monday's stage. The Television Academy's own February transparency report put its voting membership at 67% white, 9.2% Black.

Salli Richardson-Whitfield, double-nominated for Outstanding Directing (Drama)
Photo credit: Rowan Daly

LEGENDS

A new weekly series, launched with The Colored Girls (Donna Brazile, Yolanda Caraway, Leah Daughtry, Tina Flournoy, and Minyon Moore).

Dr. Betty Shabazz: Reinvention After Devastation

Credit: The Shabazz Center

Dr. Betty Shabazz's story deserves to be known independently of Malcolm X. After witnessing her husband's assassination while pregnant and in the presence of their children, she was left to raise six daughters — yet the rest of her life was not simply an epilogue to his. She continued her education, earned advanced degrees, became an educator and administrator, and emerged as an important public voice.

For women, there is a profound lesson here: your life is allowed to have a second act. Catastrophe did not erase her intellectual ambition. Motherhood didn't eliminate it. Widowhood didn't eliminate it. Being attached to an iconic man didn't eliminate it. Survival isn't necessarily the destination — sometimes survival is what makes reinvention possible.

THE WIN

Amy Sherald breaks a fifty-year streak

Amy Sherald on the cover of TIME, photographed by Tyler Mitchell

Photograph by Tyler Mitchell for TIME

Amy Sherald is on the cover of Time, photographed by Tyler Mitchell for the magazine's first-ever TIME100 Art list. It's been fifty years since a living painter has been featured solo on Time's cover. Sherald is the artist behind Michelle Obama's official First Lady portrait and the tribute portrait of Breonna Taylor, and her retrospective "American Sublime" has been touring major museums to packed houses all year. This one is worth sitting with: fifty years, and it's her.

THE WATCH

Mail-in voting survives the midterms. The bigger fight isn't over.

This one is finally resolved, at least for now. On Monday, the Supreme Court denied the Trump administration's request to implement new USPS restrictions on mail-in ballots before the November midterms. Voters can keep using existing mail-voting procedures: no new envelope designs, no federal voter-data portal, no barcode requirements standing between a ballot and a mailbox.

It took a full swing of the pendulum to get here. In August, the Court sided with the administration on a technicality, ruling that states had sued too early since no final rule existed yet. USPS then issued that rule, and two judges, Indira Talwani in Boston and Carl Nichols in D.C., one an Obama appointee, one a Trump appointee, both blocked it. The administration went back to the Supreme Court asking to lift Talwani's injunction. This time, the Court said no, 7-2, with only Alito and Thomas willing to let the rule take effect.

Justice Kavanaugh's concurrence is the detail worth sitting with. He wrote that the rule probably does fall within USPS's legal authority. He just thought it was too late in the cycle for states to comply without chaos. That's not a ruling that presidential control over mail ballots is unconstitutional. It's a ruling that this particular attempt came at the wrong time. The authority question stays open, which means this fight is due back before the Court well ahead of 2028.

Stay rooted.

- LD

Black Lady News is a weekly curation by Leah Daughtry.
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Black Lady News · Issue 021 · September 2026

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