Stand in the Center
- A WEEKLY NOTE FROM LEAH DAUGHTRY -
Black
Lady
News
What matters this week.
For the women who move the world.
Issue No. 025
Friday, October 16, 2026
A NOTE FROM LEAH
Dorothy Height once said she learned to stand in the center of the photograph so she wouldn’t be elbowed out of the picture. I’ve been sitting with that line all week.
Because this week, a lot of people worked hard to elbow Black women out of the picture. The White House set up its own hearing to try, again, to remove Lisa Cook from the Federal Reserve. Federal agents showed up at Ilhan Omar’s door 22 days before her election. And the price of gas and heat, and soon groceries, went up on the women with the least room in the budget to absorb it.
None of that is new. What’s new is how plainly and blatantly it’s being done.
So here’s what Dr. Height would tell us, and what I’m telling you: stand in the center. Forty-seven states and DC let you vote before Election Day. Make your plan. Check your registration. Bring somebody with you. And next week, when NCNW gathers in Atlanta, remember that the house she built is still standing because women kept showing up to it.
There’s good news in here too. Our HBCUs are so full they can’t take everyone who applies, and nearly two out of three of their students are Black women. Hold on to that.
Let’s get into it.
THE HEADLINE
The Pump Is the First Bill.
Prices are rising again. Black women pay first, whether they drive or not.
Prices rose 3.7% over the past year, the government said Wednesday, up from 3.4% in August. The jump was mostly fuel: gasoline is up 34% and energy prices overall are up 20%. Groceries, for now, have barely moved.
For now is the important part.
An energy spike lands hardest where the budget has the least give. Black households already spend a bigger share of their income on energy than white households, more than 40% more by one measure. And Black women start with less. A Black woman working full time brings home a median $991 a week, government figures show. A white man brings home $1,400. That’s about 71 cents on his dollar, before a single price goes up, and last week’s jobs report showed Black women’s unemployment rising. When a fill-up costs a third more, the woman commuting to a second shift, the caregiver driving her mother to appointments, and the single mom with one car all pay it first.
But you don’t need a car to pay this bill. One in five Black adults rarely or never drives, three times the rate for white adults. For the woman who takes the bus in Brooklyn, Philly or Chicago, the spike still shows up in her electric bill (up 4.4%) and her gas heat (up 5%), and the cold is coming.
And whether she drives or not, she eats. Diesel hit a record in September, and diesel moves the trucks that stock the shelves. Fuel is 15% to 30% of what food costs, grocers say, and airfares are already up 22%. Grocery prices haven’t caught up yet only because freight contracts haven’t repriced. Economists say they will.
The pump is the first bill. The checkout line is next.
Bureau of Labor Statistics, Consumer Price Index, Sept. 2026, and Usual Weekly Earnings, Q2 2026; ACEEE; Pew Research Center; AP
THE PROFILE
Beverly Buchanan
She built monuments to the Black South. Now the art world is catching up.
Beverly Buchanan, School Shack. Image: Artsy
Before Beverly Buchanan became an artist known for transforming humble Southern shacks into works of art, she had another career entirely.
Buchanan earned two master’s degrees from Columbia University, in parasitology and in public health, and spent the early 1970s working in New York and New Jersey, educating communities about birth control and vaccinations. In 1971 she took a class with Norman Lewis, the influential Black abstract expressionist, and he became a mentor. Eventually, art won.
In 1977, Buchanan left New York and returned to the South. There she found the subject that would define much of her work: the small, weathered houses, shotgun homes and handmade structures that dotted Black communities across the region.
Her miniature “shack sculptures” weren’t simply architectural studies. They were portraits.
Buchanan was interested in the people who built these homes, often with limited money and whatever materials were available, and in the lives that unfolded inside them. She sometimes accompanied the sculptures with stories about their real or imagined inhabitants.
“I want to give people who can neither read nor write but made all the measurements and built their own barns and shacks a different way of looking at themselves,” Buchanan once explained.
She also made more explicitly historical work. Her 1981 Marsh Ruins, constructed near Brunswick, Georgia, sits not far from Igbo Landing, where in 1803 captive Igbo people resisted enslavement, with many choosing death rather than bondage. Buchanan’s slowly weathering forms function as a quiet memorial to Black history embedded in the Southern landscape.
Buchanan died in 2015. But more than a decade later, her reputation is experiencing another significant rise.
This year, Spike Island in Bristol mounted the largest European survey of her work, spanning five decades, and she was featured in the Venice Biennale.
The renewed attention raises a familiar question: How many Black women create important work during their lifetimes only to have the larger culture recognize its significance later?
Beverly Buchanan spent decades paying attention to structures and people that others might have passed without noticing.
Now people are paying attention to her.
New Georgia Encyclopedia; Spike Island; La Biennale di Venezia
THE FIVE
01 Angela Rye wants receipts.
The former executive director of the Congressional Black Caucus launched Cite Your Source on YouTube last week, with new episodes Wednesdays at 9 p.m. ET. A live fact-checker and a buzzer stop panelists mid-claim, the record scratches, and the speaker has to prove it. Rye told The Root the format grew out of her CNN years, when panels split into camps and no minds changed. Outrage travels faster than facts, and a Black woman is building a show where the facts win the round. Coming up: should the N-word be retired? (The Root; The Source)
02 Georgia’s ticket runs through Black women.
Keisha Lance Bottoms for governor. Tanya Miller for attorney general. Penny Brown Reynolds for secretary of state. The question isn’t only who wins. It’s who runs the state after: who writes the budget, who sues on Georgians’ behalf, and who certifies the next election. On Nov. 3, Georgia decides whether Black women hold the levers or just turn out the vote. (Democratic Party of Georgia; Georgia Secretary of State)
03 The Court said give her a hearing. So he built one in his own house.
In June, the Supreme Court kept Fed Governor Lisa Cook, the first Black woman on the Federal Reserve Board, in her seat because she was never given notice or a chance to respond. Last week the White House answered: a committee of three presidential appointees, a closed-door hearing at the White House on Nov. 5, and Justice Department lawyers allowed to do the questioning. The committee reports to the man who already tried to fire her. She has not been charged with anything. She’ll be in Europe that day for Fed policy meetings, her lawyer says, and he calls the committee biased. That is due process in form only. (White House memorandum, Oct. 7; AP; Quartz; Tag24)
04 Same week. Same playbook.
On Monday, federal agents searched the Washington home of Rep. Ilhan Omar, 22 days before an election she is favored to win. The Justice Department won’t say what it’s looking for, and she hasn’t been charged. The goal, the Wall Street Journal reports, is to strip her citizenship and deport her. Her office calls the probe baseless. For decades, the department has held itself to a rule: no move that could tip an election. Its own written policy bars timing an investigation to affect one. The top Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee, Rep. Jamie Raskin, says it broke that rule anyway. Agents took her phone and subpoenaed members of her family, NBC reports. With this Administration, that’s par for the course. Paperwork from her family’s immigration. Paperwork on Cook’s mortgages. Different files, same target: a Black woman holding power the president wants back. (AP; NBC News; CNBC; Wall Street Journal via Al Jazeera; Lawfare; House Judiciary Democrats)
05 Legal today. Uninsured tomorrow.
On Oct. 1, refugees, asylees, and survivors of trafficking and torture who are lawfully in this country lost their Medicaid. The cut came from the tax-and-spending law Congress passed last year. Green card holders keep coverage, but nearly 150,000 refugee green card applications are stuck in the backlog. KFF Health News counts more than 281,000 people at risk in nine states and DC alone. The question nobody is counting yet: how many are African and Caribbean women, the caregivers and home health aides who keep everyone else well. (Global Refuge; KFF Health News)
THE LEGENDS
Dr. Dorothy I. Height
1912-2010. Fourth president of the National Council of Negro Women.
Barnard College accepted Dorothy Height, then turned her away because its quota for Black students was already filled. So she went to New York University, was accepted, and had two degrees by 1932.
In 1937 she met Mary McLeod Bethune and joined the National Council of Negro Women. Twenty years later she became its fourth president. She led it for four decades.
On the day of the March on Washington, no woman was allowed to speak from the podium. NCNW opened its headquarters to the marchers, and the next day Height convened her own meeting: After the March, What? The following summer she sent racially mixed teams of women into rural Mississippi, week after week, to build trust and register Black voters. They called it Wednesdays in Mississippi.
She did most of her work away from the microphone. She built the rooms other people spoke in. The nation caught up late: the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1994, the Congressional Gold Medal in 2004.
Next week, October 21-25, NCNW gathers in Atlanta for its 62nd national convention. The house she ran for forty years is still standing, and still full.
National Park Service, Mary McLeod Bethune Council House National Historic Site; NCNW
Photos: Sac Cultural Hub (early); Adrian Hood / Wikimedia Commons (later)
THE WIN
HBCUs are so full they can’t take everyone who applies. Most of their students are Black women.
Morgan State had 7,151 students in 2019. This fall it has 12,477. North Carolina A&T, the largest HBCU in the country, enrolled 15,713. Howard grew by half in five years. And Spelman got so many applications that its admission rate fell from 51% to 19%. Spelman now admits fewer than one in five who apply.
Nearly two out of three HBCU students are women. The pipeline that has built Black women’s leadership for more than a century is full, and getting fuller.
Inside Higher Ed; U.S. Department of Education via Journal of Blacks in Higher Education
THE WATCH
Pope Leo XIV has lung cancer. He disclosed the growth at Sunday prayer, and by Tuesday night the Vatican had published the diagnosis: adenocarcinoma, part of his right lung removed, no complications. Stage and next steps wait on more tests. By Thursday he was walking his room and saying Mass from the hospital. Watch the recovery. Send good thoughts and prayers.
Vatican medical bulletin; Vatican News; AP
Voting has already started. Forty-seven states and DC let every voter cast a ballot in person before Election Day, through early voting or in-person absentee voting. Election Day is Nov. 3. Have you made your voting plan? Know when, where, and how you will vote, and make sure your registration is secure: www.vote.org.
Center for Election Innovation and Research; Congressional Research Service, citing NCSL
Mothers are covered. The paperwork is the threat. Black women still die from pregnancy-related causes at about three times the rate of white women: 44.8 deaths per 100,000 births against 14.2, the CDC’s latest count shows. Postpartum Medicaid isn’t shrinking. Every state but Arkansas now covers new mothers for a full year. The danger comes in January, when Medicaid work-reporting rules begin. New mothers are exempt on paper, but a state has to know she’s a new mother. Earlier work-requirement programs in Arkansas and Georgia dropped people who did everything right. Watch how your state flags pregnant and postpartum women before Jan. 1.
CDC/NCHS, 2024 maternal mortality data; Georgetown Center for Children and Families
Fired by DOGE. Still standing. Barely. The unemployment numbers say Black women lost federal jobs. A new series from Capital B, The 19th, MindSite News and The Nation follows what came next: the anxiety, the marriages under strain, the shame of being punished for doing everything right. Darlene Tart-Scott gave Health and Human Services more than 20 years before her key card stopped working in April 2025. Read the series.
Capital B; The 19th; MindSite News; The Nation
NCNW heads to Atlanta. One mission. From October 21-25, the National Council of Negro Women gathers at the Hyatt Regency Atlanta for its 62nd National Convention, under the theme Leading. Legacy. Lasting Impact. NCNW says it is bringing 2,000 Black women from 33 states, more than 130 campuses and its 38 national affiliates to activate Black women’s social and political power. On the schedule: a public meeting on the concerns of Black voters (Thursday, Oct. 22); early-vote canvassing with the Black Women’s Leadership Collective and the Power of the Sister Tour (Saturday, Oct. 24); and that evening’s gala honoring Terri Jackson, the Honorable Marcia Fudge and Ambassador Andrew Young. Gospel artist Karen Clark Sheard and Rev. Jamal Bryant close it out Sunday morning, with appearances from former Atlanta Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms, Sen. Jon Ossoff and more. Black women are ready to go. #NCNWCON62
NCNW
A note: I co-convene the Black Women’s Leadership Collective, which is canvassing with NCNW in Atlanta.
ONE THING TO READ
The Vanishing Black Caucus
The New York Times Editorial Board, Oct. 14, 2026
Every redistricting fight comes down to who gets drawn in and who gets drawn out. This week the Times editorial board took on what the Supreme Court’s turn on gerrymandering means for Black lawmakers, and the math is stark: “Black representation in Congress could fall by nearly one-third, making the Black share of Congress far lower than the Black share of the U.S. population.” Read it with a pen, then make sure you’re on the rolls before Nov. 3.
Read it at the New York Times ->
Stay rooted.
- LD
Black Lady News is a weekly curation by Leah Daughtry.
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