ARCHIVES OF LEAD STORIES
April 14, 2005
Black women finding success in Hub politics
Scott Daugherty
and Yawu Miller
When Linda Dorcena Forry won the race for the 12th Suffolk District
State House seat in March, her success was hailed as a victory
for the district’s black electorate, which had long been
represented by whites.
Forry’s election effectively added another seat to the Massachusetts
Legislative Black Caucus and put a second Haitian American on
Beacon Hill. Forry faced competition from three men (two of them
black) and one other woman, walking away with 47 percent of the
vote.
Her victory over her male competitors is part of an emerging trend:
black women are claiming a larger share of the elected offices
across the United States.
While black women made up just 6.8 percent of all black elected
officials in the United States in 1970, by 1990 they constituted
26 percent and ten years later, 35 percent.
According to David Bositis, senior political analyst with the
Washington, D.C.-based Joint Center for Political and Economic
Studies, the number of black men in office has been declining.
“All of the gains in the number of black elected officials
in the last five years have been from black women,” he told
the Banner.
In comparison, white women represent just 21 percent of all white
elected officials.
Locally, Doris Bunte became the first black woman elected to the
State House in 1973. By 1977, when Cambridge resident Saundra
Graham was elected, there were three black women in the Legislative
Black Caucus and five black men.
Today there are two African American men in the State House and
five African American women. The highest-ranking black elected
officials in the Boston area are state Sen. Dianne Wilkerson and
Suffolk County Sheriff Andrea Cabral.
Former WCVB-TV 4 reporter Sarah Ann Shaw thinks that one reason
black women are succeeding in public life has to do with the culture
in which they were raised.
“As you come up in a culture that was involved in church,
civic and social organizing you get early training. Maybe there
are more training grounds for women than for men,” she says.
Wilkerson points to what she says is a shared responsibility between
genders within the black community and asserts that black culture
is much less defined by gender roles.
State Rep. Byron Rushing agrees.
“Except for a few institutions in the black community women
are accepted in positions of leadership in ways that the larger
society does not,” he says.
Black women have long held leadership positions in local community
agencies, CDCs, community health centers and other nonprofits.
In City Hall, black women head city departments including Neighborhood
Development, the Boston Housing Authority and Human Resources.
Whether or not there are differences between the black and white
Boston communities’ respective attitudes toward women candidates,
Bositis says the relative strength of black women candidates on
the national level can be explained by demographics.
“The black adult population is more female than the white
adult population,” he comments.
Black men make up just 44 percent of the adult African American
population due to higher mortality rates. Of all major population
groups in the United States, black men have the lowest life expectancy.
“The black electorate is much more female,” Bositis
says. “In the last presidential election, black men were
five percent of all voters. Black women were seven percent.”
Rushing suggested that having more women voters and women running
for office counters any sexism, allowing the electorate the opportunity
to vote based on the quality of the candidate rather than their
gender.
Boston’s relative wealth of black women elected officials
may be too recent a phenomenon to qualify as a full-blown trend.
Although women are well represented overall in the Boston black
community’s electoral realm, no woman of color has ever
been elected to a city council seat.
Traditionally, blacks have been able to win elections in just
two of the nine district seats on the council. Those seats, which
were first created in 1983, have seen relatively little turnover.
Several women, including Althea Garrison and Jacqueline Payne
Thompson, have run for one of the city’s four at-large seats
with no success. The only candidate to break the color barrier
in the at large race since 1983 was Felix Arroyo, a Puerto Rican
native.
On the elected school committee, which was abolished in 1990,
black women also had little success. Jean McGuire was a notable
exception, pulling in an astonishing 89,000 votes in one year
as an at-large candidate — far more than the 36,000 Arroyo
won in his second-place finish in the 2003 election.
High offices held by black men include the Suffolk County district
attorney’s office formerly held by Ralph Martin and the
United States Senate seat held by Edward Brooke from 1966 to 1978.
Brooke, Carol Mosely Braun and Barak Obama are the only three
blacks elected to the Senate since reconstruction.
While black women have not yet held a city council seat, Joyce
Ferriabough, a media and political consultant, points out that
many male candidates had women driving their campaigns. She cites
the campaigns of her in-laws, former state Sen. Royal Bolling
Sr., former state Rep. Royal Bolling Jr. and her husband, the
first black president of the city council in Boston, Bruce Bolling,
as examples.
“Women drove all those campaigns. [Bolling Sr.] had eight
sisters who were a built-in campaign team.”
Women are and have already been doing the types of constituency
services required of a representative. It makes sense for women
who have a history of public service to want to move up into positions
where they could have more control over legislation that affects
their communities, according to Ferriabough.
“Black women did a lot of community work before running,”
she says.
Yancey thinks the relative power black women hold in black community
politics is a function of a strong sense of democracy within the
community.
“African American elected officials are more progressive
— it’s not a question of tolerance; it’s of
enthusiastically supporting people of quality.”
Nationwide, the percentage of black elected officials is still
far below that necessary to be proportionally representative of
African Americans. Black officials hold 9,159 positions in the
country representing just 1.8 percent of all electable positions
in 2001 according to the Joint Center.
The question of gender in this relatively small representation
is “almost extraneous until we get into a position of power,”
says Shaw.
“We are still not in a position where we can make the decisions
about our lives.” The real question is “How do we
level the playing field?” added Shaw.
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