As previously reported by JBHE, the United States Congress is more diverse than ever, with 26 percent of all congressional members representing non-White backgrounds. A new report from Pew Research Center has taken a more detailed look at Congress, examining the status of the country’s current lawmakers who are women of color.
Overall, there are 61 women of color in the 119th Congress, 31 of whom are Black. Of these Black women, two are senators, two are non-voting delegates, and 27 are members of the House of Representatives. The country’s current Black women lawmakers, all of whom are Democrats, represent 20 states, as well as Washington, D.C., and the U.S. Virgin Islands.
The 119th Congress is the first with two Black women senators serving as the same time: Angela Alsobrooks of Maryland and Lisa Blunt Rochester of Delaware. Blunt Rochester is also the only Black woman to have served in both the Senate and House of Representatives. This past election cycle, Oregon elected its first Black member of Congress, Representative Janella Bynum.
Black women have served in the U.S. Congress for nearly six decades, since Representative Shirley Chisholm of New York was elected in 1968. It took nearly three decades from her historic election for the country to elect its first Black woman senator in 1992: Carol Moseley Braun of Illinois. Only one Black woman lawmaker in the history of the United States has been a member of the Republican party: the late Mia Love of Utah.
Over half of all Black women ever elected to Congress took office within the past 12 years. Of the 64 Black women who have served in Congress, 60 have served in the House of Representatives, either as voting members (57) or nonvoting members from D.C. (1) or the U.S. Virgin Islands (2). The country’s only other Black women senators besides Senators Moseley Braun, Alsobrooks, and Blunt Rochester, are former Vice President Kamala Harris and Senator Laphonza Butler of California, who temporarily filled Diane Fienstein’s seat after her death in 2023.
