Keisha Lance Bottoms became the first Black woman elected governor of a state on November 3, 2026, and the woman who has been funding and training candidates like her since 2017 says nobody should call that progress inevitable.
Glynda C. Carr is president and chief executive of Higher Heights for America, which has backed Bottoms since her first Atlanta mayoral campaign in 2017. Writing after the midterms, Carr counted the ground that moved. Bottoms in Georgia. Stacey Plaskett, the U.S. Virgin Islands delegate since 2015, elected governor there. Juliana Stratton, the Illinois lieutenant governor, winning a Senate seat that puts three Black women in the chamber at the same time for the first time, alongside Angela Alsobrooks and Lisa Blunt Rochester. Maxine Waters, Terri Sewell and Ayanna Pressley all won new terms, and Black women also won attorney general, secretary of state, lieutenant governor and mayoral races at state and city level.
“We watched Black women step into executive leadership, breaking barriers that have stood for far too long,” Carr wrote. “Black women are not waiting for history to be made. We are making it.”
Then she put the number on it. Two hundred and fifty years passed before a Black woman was elected to run a state. “Progress this slow is not inevitable progress,” she wrote. Barriers and underinvestment are what made it slow, and recruitment and training are what shortened it.
“We are not willing to wait another 250 years for the next breakthrough,” she said.
