Watch Me!
- A WEEKLY NOTE FROM LEAH DAUGHTRY -
Black
Lady
News
What matters this week.
For the women who move the world.
Issue No. 026
Friday, October 23, 2026
A NOTE FROM LEAH
Myrlie Evers-Williams was told a woman couldn’t lead the NAACP. She answered with two words: “Watch me!” Then she won the chair by one vote.
Two words, and the men who doubted her had their answer. The people who spent this year trying to shrink us (our districts, our seats, our place at the Fed) keep making the same mistake. They keep telling us what we can’t do.
So watch us. Georgia has already cast more than a million early ballots, and Black voters are turning out above our share of the rolls. Virginia and North Carolina are running well ahead of 2022. Saturday, Black men have their own day at the polls, and NCNW’s sisters will be knocking doors in Atlanta. Lisa Cook is telling the White House it doesn’t get to set her schedule. Tayari Jones just took home the Kirkus Prize. And on the runway in Los Angeles, Black women owned the night.
One vote made Myrlie chair. Don’t let anybody tell you yours is too small.
Let’s get into it.
THE HEADLINE
Who’s Moving the Vote
Early voting is breaking records across the South. Look at who’s in line.
Election Day is less than two weeks away, and the lines are already long. Georgia has cast more than 1.3 million early ballots, about a third of its entire 2022 turnout. Virginia is right behind it, with nearly 771,000 ballots in by Tuesday and close to 300,000 more than at this point four years ago. North Carolina is running more than a third ahead of its 2022 pace. In Dallas County, Texas, more people voted in person on the first day than on day one in 2020, a presidential year.
So who is in line? Where states track race, the answer is plain. In Georgia, Black voters are about 31% of the rolls and had cast 33.8% of the state’s early ballots by Thursday morning, according to the Georgia Votes tracker. In North Carolina, Black voters were 26% of first-day voters, up from 21% on day one in 2024, when Kamala Harris was on the ballot. In the state’s redrawn 1st District, trackers put the Black share of opening-day voters at about 41%.
Virginia doesn’t record voters’ race, so its surge can’t be broken out. And no state yet lets us count Black women by name in these numbers. But history tells you who has carried this vote for decades.
This is not weather. It’s work. Church vans, sorority phone banks, the aunties who drive the neighbors. And this weekend the work gets company: Saturday is the first National Black Man Voter Day, and the same morning NCNW and the Black Women’s Leadership Collective will be knocking doors in Atlanta. (More in The Watch.)
Early votes aren’t final votes, and plenty of these voters would have voted anyway, just later. Nobody wins in October. But on Nov. 4 every campaign in the country asks one question: who showed up? Right now, the answer is us.
Georgia Secretary of State; Georgia Votes; University of Florida Election Lab via Axios; Virginia Public Access Project; North Carolina State Board of Elections via CNN; Call the Map; Differentiator Data
THE PROFILE
Adrienne Adams
From a Queens community board to the statewide ballot.
Photo courtesy of Higher Heights for America PAC
Adrienne Adams didn’t start in politics. She started in a Fortune 500 training room.
Raised in Hollis, Queens, by union parents, she briefly attended York College before earning a psychology degree at Spelman College. She built a career as a corporate trainer, specializing in executive training and human capital management. Her way into public life ran through Queens Community Board 12, which she chaired for three terms, working on schools, neighborhood development and economic opportunity in Southeast Queens.
In 2017, she became the first woman elected to represent the City Council’s 28th District. In 2022, her colleagues made her the first Black speaker of the New York City Council, at the head of the first women-majority Council in the city’s history.
As speaker, she moved legislation targeting racial disparities in maternal care, expanded access to reproductive health care and moved to protect homeowners from deed theft. She helped build CUNY Reconnect, which has brought thousands of working adults back to college, and secured funding for the state’s first four trauma recovery centers. She also stood up to Mayor Eric Adams (no relation) over budgets, public safety and appointments. In 2025, she ran for mayor and came up short.
In February, Gov. Kathy Hochul chose her as her running mate, making them New York’s first all-woman major-party ticket for governor. If they win on Nov. 3, Adams, 65, would be the state’s first Black woman lieutenant governor.
This week, Black women rallied for her in New York City, among them Attorney General Letitia James, L. Joy Williams and Dr. Stacie NC Grant.
She is a member of Alpha Kappa Alpha Sorority, Inc., and a longtime member of the NAACP and the National Action Network.
Community board. Council seat. Speaker’s gavel. She did the work at every level before anyone handed her a statewide stage. Now New York decides.
New York City Council; NY1; City & State New York
THE FIVE
01 A women’s health office, with no new money.
On Monday, President Trump signed an order creating a women’s health division at the National Institutes of Health and a White House task force led by chief of staff Susie Wiles. The order names fibroids, endometriosis, menopause, infertility, heart disease, cancer, Alzheimer’s and PCOS. It names no dollar amount. It also revokes President Biden’s 2024 order on women’s health research. And it lands while NIH is under orders to cut its spending by about a third. Fibroids are on the list for a reason: Black women are two to three times more likely than white women to be diagnosed with them, NIH says, and more likely to have larger and more numerous ones. A new office is only a promise. Watch the budget, and watch whether race ever shows up in it. (Contemporary OB/GYN; STAT; Al Jazeera; NICHD)
02 Not on your schedule.
Last week the White House built its own hearing to try, again, to remove Fed Governor Lisa Cook, the first Black woman on the Federal Reserve Board. Her lawyers have answered. Cook won’t be at the closed-door session on Nov. 5. She’ll be in Europe for monetary policy meetings, and the earliest she can appear is after the Fed’s Dec. 8-9 meeting. Her lawyer, Abbe Lowell, calls the three-member committee “demonstrably biased.” One member, White House economic adviser Kevin Hassett, has already said the president has cause to fire her. The Supreme Court said she gets notice and a chance to respond. It didn’t say the man who wants her gone gets to pick the panel. Watch whether the White House moves the date, or moves ahead without her. (AP; SCOTUSblog)
03 A blueprint, not a lament.
Black women are being fired, investigated and mocked on air, and David J. Johns is done with hand-wringing about it. In Word In Black this week, the editor of The Black Papers lays out what to do instead: pass the Momnibus to fight maternal deaths, pass the PRO Act so workers can organize, have insurers pay for doulas, end the zero-tolerance discipline that pushes Black girls out of school, and get philanthropy to fund organizations led by Black women. His line worth keeping: “Talking about gender inside our own house is precision, not division.” That’s a man saying it inside the house. The house should hear it. (Word In Black)
04 Louise Lucas, indicted.
On Thursday, Virginia state Sen. L. Louise Lucas, 82, surrendered to federal agents. The Justice Department charges that she led a marijuana enterprise run through the Portsmouth cannabis shop she co-owns, laundered the proceeds, and used her chairmanship of the Senate Finance and Appropriations Committee to protect it. The eight-count indictment also names two of her daughters and a grandson, and includes racketeering conspiracy, bribery and firearms charges. These are allegations, and she is presumed innocent. Lucas answered within hours. “I grew up under Jim Crow,” she said in a statement. “I’ve seen what happens when people in power try to silence those who stand up to them.” And: “I will not be intimidated. I will not be bullied. And I will not back down.” She is also the Senate president pro tempore who drove Virginia’s push for a new congressional map, the one voters approved and the state Supreme Court threw out, and a loud critic of the president. Agents searched her shop and office in May. Watch what the evidence shows in court, not on cable. (U.S. Department of Justice; CBS News; ABC News; statement from Sen. Lucas)
05 Pope Leo XIV is home, and needs no more treatment.
Four days after doctors removed the cancerous lower lobe of his right lung, the pope walked out of Rome’s Gemelli Hospital on Saturday to a cheering crowd. On Wednesday, the Vatican said final tests confirmed the cancer was localized, and his doctors said no further treatment is needed. The same day, he held his first general audience since the surgery, in the rain, and thanked everyone who prayed for him. His surgeon sees no reason to skip next month’s trip to Uruguay, Argentina and Peru. Prayers answered. (Vatican; CBS News; EWTN News)
THE LEGENDS
Myrlie Evers-Williams
Born 1933. Chair of the NAACP, 1995-1998.
Myrlie Beasley met Medgar Evers at Alcorn A&M in 1950 and married him the next year. By 1954 they were running the NAACP’s Mississippi office together, organizing voter registration drives in a state built to keep Black people away from the ballot.
In June 1963, Medgar was shot and killed outside their home in Jackson. Two all-white juries refused to convict the man who did it. She refused to let it go. She kept the case alive for three decades, and in 1994, at a third trial, Byron De La Beckwith was finally convicted. Thirty-one years.
In between, she built a life of her own. She moved her children to California, finished her degree at Pomona College, worked in business, and served on the Los Angeles Board of Public Works.
In 1995 the NAACP was mired in scandal and debt. Men told her a woman couldn’t lead it. Her answer: “Watch me!” She won the chair by one vote. Days later, her husband, Walter Williams, a dockworker and civil rights activist, died. She kept going. She put the organization back on firm financial footing and stepped down in 1998. In 2013 she became the first woman and the first layperson to deliver the invocation at a presidential inauguration.
She is 93 now, the second living woman in this series. Her life is a record of what one vote, and one woman who would not quit, can do. Eleven days out from Election Day, that’s the lesson.
AARP; NAACP; NPR; National Park Service; World Book
Photos: Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture (early); Instagram (later)
THE WIN
On the runway and on the shelf.
The runway. For the first time since 2007, the Victoria’s Secret Fashion Show came home to Los Angeles on Sunday night, and Black women were everywhere. Anok Yai stepped out of a blooming pink flower to open the show’s spring segment. Precious Lee walked in chandelier wings. Jasmine Tookes, Joan Smalls and Cindy Bruna were back. Natalia Bryant, 23, and Olympic gold medalist Trinity Rodman made their runway debuts.
Then a newcomer took the night. Solange Omon, 21, born in Cameroon and a college student in Maine, won the brand’s nationwide search for its newest Angel. They called her name on the runway.
And Megan Thee Stallion closed out the night performing in silver wings.
By theGrio’s count, it’s the most Black women ever to walk the show in wings. Let them see us.
The shelf. Tayari Jones’s Kin won the 2026 Kirkus Prize for Fiction and $50,000. Her fifth novel follows Annie and Niecy, two motherless girls from rural Louisiana, and a friendship tested by distance, time and class. Jones told the ceremony that writing it sent her back to her mother’s generation to understand herself, and she credited her mother and aunt for the stories inside it. It was already Oprah’s first book club pick of the year. Now it has the prize.
theGrio; Models.com; Ebony; AP
Kin cover courtesy of Penguin Random House.
THE WATCH
Tomorrow, the brothers are up. Saturday, Oct. 24, is the first National Black Man Voter Day, capping a week of barbershop talks, faith events and voter organizing built around five pillars: mental, physical, spiritual, financial and civic health. The goal is 100,000 Black men. The coalition is co-led by the NAACP, the National Urban League, 100 Black Men of America, Black Men Vote and Woke Vote. More than 5,000 Black men have engaged so far, organizers say. Black women have carried this vote for decades. This time the ask is aimed at the men: make a plan, bring a brother. Mike Bland of Black Men Vote put it plainly. This is not about saving a party. The test is whether it holds past one Saturday. blackmanvoterday.org
NAACP; National Urban League; The Root
And the sisters are already in Atlanta. The National Council of Negro Women is midway through its 62nd National Convention at the Hyatt Regency Atlanta, running through Sunday. Saturday morning, NCNW says, its members will knock doors for the early vote alongside the Black Women’s Leadership Collective and the Power of the Sister Tour. Saturday night, the gala honors Terri Jackson, former HUD Secretary Marcia Fudge, and Ambassador Andrew Young. Same day, two fronts. The brothers in their cities, the sisters in Georgia. That’s what a full turnout looks like.
NCNW
The Justice Department is sending watchers to Detroit. Federal election monitors will be at polling places on Nov. 3 in seven Michigan cities: Detroit, Flint, Lansing, East Lansing, Grand Rapids, Hamtramck and Warren, the Justice Department told the state this week. Michigan’s leaders aren’t sounding an alarm. Attorney General Dana Nessel calls monitors “a standard part of our election process,” and they were in Detroit, Lansing, Hamtramck and East Lansing for the August primary. But look at the list. Detroit is about three-quarters Black. Flint is majority-Black. So know your rights before you go. A monitor is a watcher, nothing more. Monitors cannot talk to you, touch a ballot or a machine, or interfere with how the election is run. If anyone tries, report it. Nessel says her office will act against anyone who intimidates voters or election workers.
CBS News Detroit; U.S. Census Bureau
A note: I co-convene the Black Women’s Leadership Collective, which is canvassing with NCNW in Atlanta.
ONE THING TO HEAR
It’s Good Over Here
Felicia Pride with Danyel Smith, episode 2
Danyel Smith ran Vibe and wrote the book on Black women in pop. On Felicia Pride’s podcast, she names what ambitious Black women over 40 already know: the resentment doesn’t fade with age. It grows, because you’re still going. “There is no safe space for an ambitious Black woman,” Smith says. The real question people are asking, she says, is “Damn, you still dreaming?” Listen. Then keep dreaming anyway.
Stay rooted.
- LD
Black Lady News is a weekly curation by Leah Daughtry.
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