Where and When They Emerge: Black Women’s Entry into State Legislative Politics

• In Event: Women, Politics, and Policy: A View from the States

Abstract

Over 80 years ago, the first Black woman was elected to a state legislature. Since that time, over 1000 Black women have been elected to state legislative office (CAWP 2024). While Black women’s presence in state legislatures often outpaces their women of color and men of color counterparts (Orey and Brown 2017), where and when Black women serve is not evenly distributed across states and the group remains under-represented in the states in which they do serve. For example, scholars have pointed to states in the South because they tend to have more Black representatives (see Orey et. al 2007; Bositis 2003; Hardy-Fanta et. al 2016), but even in these states the percentage of Black women in state legislatures is largely not on par with the percentage of Black women in the state population (Rodriguez 2021). While there is evidence that Black women support their own when Black women run for office (Philpot and Walton 2007), the factors that encourage or discourage Black women from seeking political office at the state level are under-explored.

In this paper, I use candidate emergence data from the 2012 to 2020 election cycles to examine patterns in where Black women have run for state legislative office in comparison to their counterparts. I pay particular attention to accounting for variables that have been used to predict women of color’s presence in state legislatures (see Scola 2013; Reingold et. al 2020) as well as account for a host of other variables that have been used to examine state political culture more broadly. This paper sheds light on how Black women’s candidate emergence story differs from other women and men of color as well as speaks to the variation across states in where Black women feel it best to enter politics.

Author

• Jamil Shatema Scott, Georgetown University