Mamadi Doumbouya

History was made last week. Kamala Harris is the first black woman to be voted into the office of Vice Presidency in American history. There are so many reasons to celebrate this milestone. This month at LOG we do that by acknowledging the work of black women leaders in the US today.  

It is jarring to realize, to be a woman and a leader in the world today is still not considered a norm. I was struck the other day when a news commentator mentioned her five year old son who saw Kamala Harris was now our Vice President and asked if women could be leaders. Our world clearly does not have enough visible examples of female leadership. I think of the many women I grew up admiring, from Wangari Mathaai to the headmistress of my high school in Harare, Zimbabwe, Sister Gundula. I always believed that women could do anything men could do. I was always confused by how rarely we would be able to witness that potential in society. Right now many are rightfully shining a light on Stacey Abrams, a leader in our nation who has exposed and begun to rectify the shameful practice of voter suppression; a practice that has existed ever since non-white males were given access to the ballot. Stacey’s relentless focus, the work of her organization Fair Fight, along with other women’s efforts have resulted in Georgia turning blue for the first time since 1992. She has proven that age old oppressive tactics can be defeated. She spoke of how she has spent the last ten years combatting this issue and we are now able to see the fruits of her labor. Voter suppression is the opposite of democracy and the equivalent of silencing the voices of those who have a right to affect the outcome of an election and the leaders chosen as a result. Abrams work is creating a true path towards the premise this country stands on: “We the people”. 

It is a relief that we will be able to have a visible manifestation of that in our next vice president. We highlight other current black women leaders in various fields in this month’s newsletter. They are not always celebrated, but the road they have had to travel is not an easy one. Former CEO of Xerox Ursula Burns is also highlighted this month, she speaks of how she guarantees black women they will be the minority in the room and encourages them to pave a new way forward.

The awareness of the immediate discrimination and yet the choice to push forward with self belief and unwavering determination nonetheless is a superpower worthy of acknowledgement. It is a strength that benefits not just the individual but their community, their nation, and the women coming behind them. To be a black woman leader is to be a pioneer. To defy the norm, to dare to push against the status quo; to be rebellious. And thereby creating a pathway that brings about a more equitable future for all. This month we celebrate the rebels.

AP Photo/Brynn Anderson

In light of Joe Biden’s reported lead in Georgia in the presidential race, Abrams is earning praise for protecting voting rights. Here, we look back on her years-long history of fighting injustice.

Just two years ago, Stacey Abrams lost Georgia’s gubernatorial race to Republican governor Brian Kemp by a margin of less than two percentage points. Her campaign was notable for several reasons—not least of which was its conclusion, during which Abrams suggested that Kemp, who at the time was Georgia’s Secretary of State, had used his position to suppress voting.

“More than 200 years into Georgia’s democratic experiment, the state failed its voters,” Abrams said at an event following the election, per The New York Times. “Let’s be clear—this is not a speech of concession, because concession means to acknowledge an action is right, true or proper.”

As former vice president Joe Biden continues to make gains in Georgia, a traditionally red state that is now a toss-up in the presidential election, praise for Abrams and fellow organizers on the ground in the state who’ve been actively fighting against the country’s legacy of voter suppression has grown. According to the Brennan Center for Justice, at least 17 million voters between 2016 and 2018 were disenfranchised.

Though Abrams’s work since her loss has further exposed how voter suppression precludes millions of Americans from exercising their democratic rights, her investment in the issue and her political organizing began long before that race. As a student at Spelman College, she confronted then Atlanta mayor Maynard Jackson for “not doing enough for young people,” according to The Washington Post, and fought for economic justice for her constituents as a member of the Georgia House of Representatives for the good part of a decade.

*Laura Morgan Roberts, Anthony J. Mayo, Robin J. Ely, and David A. Thomas for Harvard Business Review

Stacey Abrams is a New York Times bestselling author, serial entrepreneur, nonprofit CEO and political leader. After serving for eleven years in the Georgia House of Representatives, seven as Democratic Leader, In 2018, Abrams became the Democratic nominee for Governor of Georgia, winning more votes than any other Democrat in the state’s history. Abrams was the first black woman to become the gubernatorial nominee for a major party in the United States, and she was the first black woman and first Georgian to deliver a Response to the State of the Union. 

After witnessing the gross mismanagement of the 2018 election by the Secretary of State’s office, Abrams launched Fair Fight to ensure every American has a voice in our election system through programs such as Fair Fight 2020, an initiative to fund and train voter protection teams in 20 battleground states. Over the course of her career, Abrams has founded multiple organizations devoted to voting rights, training and hiring young people of color, and tackling social issues at both the state and national levels. In 2019, she launched Fair Count to ensure accuracy in the 2020 Census and greater participation in civic engagement, and the Southern Economic Advancement Project, a public policy initiative to broaden economic power and build equity in the South.

Voter suppression of voters of color and young voters is a scourge our country faces in states across the nation.  Georgia’s 2018 elections shone a bright light on the issue with elections that were rife with mismanagement, irregularities, unbelievably long lines and more, exposing both recent and also decades-long actions and inactions by the state to thwart the right to vote. Georgians and Americans are fighting back. Fair Fight Action engages in voter mobilization and education activities and advocates for progressive issues; in addition Fair Fight Action has mounted significant programs to combat voter suppression in Georgia and nationally. 

Fair Fight PAC has initiated programs to support voter protection programs at state parties around the country and is engaging in partnerships to support and elect pro voting rights, progressive leaders.

On the two Senate races, Abrams said that Democrats need to approach them differently than they have approached Georgia runoffs in the past.

“We need to remember that Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock are the only ways that we can guarantee that Mitch McConnell will actually finally pass legislation to renew recovery investment, to help protect jobs for retail workers, for low wage workers who are suffering,” she added.“We need to reconsider this election not as a past runoff for Georgia Senate, but as the Doug Jones of 2020, where we know that the essential nature of this election changes the future of our country, protects health care, protects access to jobs and protects access to justice," Abrams said, agreeing later in the interview that Republicans were trying to fire up their base for the runoffs by challenging the outcome of the presidential election.

While Abrams has been critical of Georgia's secretary of state in the past, she dismissed calls from Perdue and Loeffler for Raffensperger to resign.

"We know that there remain challenges with our election system, but none of those challenges are the ones that Kelly Loeffler and David Perdue are levying. They are arguing that they shouldn't be in runoffs. They are arguing that the numbers should have been in their favor. That's not how voting works," Abrams said.

"It is the Republican party that has maintained this runoff system that is a vestige of Jim Crow, which was designed to keep Black votes from counting effectively in deciding the outcome of elections," she added. "So if they want to grapple with this issue in 2021, they can remove the runoff system, but until then, this is the law of Georgia, and they've got to deal with it."

Luisa Dörr for TIME

When Ursula Burns became the CEO of Xerox in 2009 at age 50, she was the first black woman to lead a Fortune 500 company. What did she learn along the way?

“A lot of what pioneers do, they do not benefit from themselves,” she says.

Climbing to the top of the corporate ladder wasn’t a given for Burns. She grew up in Manhattan’s Lower East Side, moving from a tenement building to a small apartment in the projects to, in her words, a bigger apartment in the projects. While she was poor, she said she enjoyed the support of her mother and siblings, and pursued engineering with encouragement from a guidance counselor.

“I have more money than my mother would have ever imagined, and I still don’t judge my success by that,” she says.

Though she was often one of few women—and the only woman of color—in the room, she never let it hamper her ambition. She joined Xerox as an engineering intern, and stayed on to become one of the most powerful women in business.

“I say this to women all the time, particularly women trying to get into STEM, I guarantee you you will be the minority in the room,” she says. “And instead of that being a burden, it should be an opportunity for you, to distinguish yourself.”

“All of us now are pioneers,” she says. “Every one of us.”

Burns was raised in a low-income housing project on Manhattan’s Lower East Side. She was the second of three children raised by a single mother who operated a home day-care center and took ironing and cleaning jobs to earn money to pay for Burns to attend Cathedral High School, a Roman Catholic preparatory school. Excelling at math, Burns later earned a bachelor’s degree in mechanical engineering (1980) from the Polytechnic Institute of New York University in Brooklyn. In the same year, she began pursuing a master’s degree in mechanical engineering from Columbia University and joined Xerox as a summer mechanical-engineering intern through the company’s graduate engineering program for minorities, which in turn paid a portion of her educational expenses.

After completing a master’s degree in 1981, Burns joined Xerox as a full-time employee and quickly gained a role in product development. From 1992 she progressed through various roles in management and engineering, and in 2000 she became senior vice president of corporate strategic services, a position in which she oversaw production operations. The appointment eventually afforded Burns the opportunity to broaden her leadership in the areas of global research, product development, marketing, and delivery, and she was named president of Xerox in 2007. Two years later she was named CEO, and in 2010 she became chairman of the board.

In 2009 U.S. Pres. Barack Obama selected her to help lead the Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) Education Coalition, a national alliance of more than 1,000 technological organizations striving to improve student participation and performance in the aforementioned subject areas through legislative advocacy; she held the post until 2016. Burns was also a member (2010–16) of the President’s Export Council (PEC), a group of labor, business, and government leaders who advise the president on methods to promote the growth of American exports; she chaired the committee in 2015–16.

She is currently a director of the boards of Exxon Mobil, Nestlé and Uber.

"How many more years do you say to the people who have been excluded: 'Just hold on. Give them 10 more years. They'll get there,'" Burns said. "Another generation kind of goes by the wayside of people who can be helpful, who can increase shareholder value, who can represent the stakeholders and create a just corporate America."

Brittany Packnett Cunningham, Barbara Lee, Opal Tometi, Valerie Jarrett, Kimberlé Crenshaw, Aimee Allison, Raquel Willis, Alicia Garza, Amanda Seales, Luvvie Ajayi 

In the fight for civil rights in America, Black women have steadily led the way for centuries. Black women led the Underground Railroad, were the unsung leaders of the suffrage movement, organized freedom riders, paved the way for constitutional protections against sex discrimination and remain the most consistent voting block in the United States to stand up for the rights of marginalized people.

Black women are by no means a monolith, and yet as a group have a deep understanding of the relational nature of freedom, precisely because they sit at various intersections of targeted oppression. This means that for Black women, a conversation about maternal and child health must include a discussion about access to care and unconscious bias; a conversation about raising children must include a discussion about implicit dehumanization and police brutality; a conversation about education must include a discussion about adultification biasand the school to prison pipeline; and for Black women, a discussion about gender must include a discussion about equal pay and violence against Black trans women. 

Black women’s leadership isn’t just about their strength and perseverance. 

It’s about how consistently they show up and fight for the common good. Whether Black women are narrowing the wealth gap, fighting for free and fair elections or gearing up to assume one of the highest offices in the nation, when Black women lead, we all win.

Today, we find ourselves facing another chapter in America, but it’s not a new one—the fight for racial justice is sadly familiar, and it is as painful as it is hopeful. As we continue to march in the streets, organize and demand that our nation finally realizes the promise of its founding for all Americans, the question we must ask ourselves is, will this time be different? The answer lies in you. What are you going to do to warrant a different result?

To get you started, we reached out to 10 incredible Black leaders. We hope you read, share their reflections forward, and take their recommended actions. That’s what we plan to do

Getty Images

There’s a vignette that Senator Kamala Harris likes to tell about her mother, Shyamala Gopalan Harris. It’s a well-trodden soundbite that has proliferated into hashtags and official 2020 campaign merchandise, but the commercialization shouldn’t detract from its meaning: An immigrant from India who came to the United States with dreams of curing cancer, Shyamala raised Harris and her sister Maya to be strong Black women who are mindful of what their identities mean in American work and life. “My mother would look at me,” Harris has said, “and she’d say, ‘Kamala you may be the first to do many things, but make sure you are not the last.’”

Shyamala was right: Her daughter has been “the first” a number of times. In 2010, Harris became the first African-American and first woman to serve as California’s attorney general. In 2016, she became the first Indian-American woman to be elected to the United States Senate. In August of 2020, she became the first Black woman and first Asian-American woman to appear on the presidential ticket of a major political party.

On Saturday, November 7, the Associated Press projected that former vice president Joe Biden and his running mate, Senator Kamala Harris, won the state of Pennsylvania and have earned more than 270 electoral votes in the 2020 presidential election. Senator Harris can therefore add more firsts to her list: she is officially the first female vice president-elect in United States history and the first person of color to earn the distinction as well.

In her first public statement after the race was called—a tweet—Harris didn’t mention these firsts. “This election is about so much more than @JoeBiden or me,” she said. “It’s about the soul of America and our willingness to fight for it. We have a lot of work ahead of us. Let’s get started.”

Harris’s presence in the 2020 race—both for as a candidate for president in the early days of the Democratic primary, and for vice president in the general election race—has been a potent reminder of what has been lacking in our nation’s highest office for more than two centuries.

“It's a kind of beautiful, full circle moment for the story of America, because I think women, and more specifically Black women, have done so much work—and are sort of the backbone of this country—without the acknowledgement of the work that we've done,” says Alia Daniels, cofounder of the global queer digital media network Revry. “And so I think being able to see someone who looks like me, in one of those positions, it's just a level of pride that I don't even know if I can fully express.”

Daniels notes that because we’ve seen women attain powerful positions in the private sector over the past few decades—consider former Pepsico CEO Indra Nooyi, or General Motors chief Mary Barra, to name a few boundary-breaking corporate leaders—it can be all too easy to take female leadership for granted. “But this is the highest position in our country that a woman has held,” she says. “There's something to actually seeing it.”

The American public has already witnessed Harris asserting her expertise and authority on the national stage: her use of “I’m speaking” during the vice presidential debate last month was a master class in dealing with a male interrupter, and her questioning of then-U.S. attorney general Jeff Sessions and now-Justice Brett Kavanaugh in Senate hearings in 2017 and 2018 were similar showcases of feminine confidence and capability. But her impending presence in the executive branch of government has the potential to be as instructive as inspirational.

“No one can deny the power of seeing somebody who shares an identity, like your gender or your race, which are so salient in American society, certainly, in a position of power,” says Colleen Ammerman, director of the Gender Initiative at Harvard Business School. Ammerman points to research that has shown how female role models and mentors, as well as mere exposure to portraits of female leaders, can help encourage women to speak up, stand up and perhaps achieve more. “The images of leadership and power that we see are overwhelmingly white and male. Sometimes we don't even quite notice that until we see something different,” she says.

*Maggie McGrath for Forbes

Leadership lessons from senior African-American women by Laura Morgan Roberts, Anthony J. Mayo, Robin J. Ely, and David A. Thomas

Any list of top CEOs reveals a startling lack of diversity. Among the leaders of Fortune 500 companies, for example, just 32 are women; with the recent departure of Ken Chenault from American Express, just three are African-American; and not one is an African-American woman. What’s going on?

This spring marks the 50th anniversary of the founding of the African-American Student Union at Harvard Business School, and in preparation for the commemoration we have been studying the careers of the approximately 2,300 alumni of African descent who have graduated from HBS since its founding, in 1908. From that group we identified 532 African-American women who graduated from 1977 to 2015. We analyzed the career paths of the 67 of them who have attained the position of chair, CEO, or other C-level executive in a corporation or senior managing director or partner in a professional services firm, and we conducted in-depth interviews with 30 of those 67.

How did these women beat the odds? Certainly, they are well prepared and highly competitive in the job market; according to our data, they have invested more years in higher education, at more-selective institutions, than their colleagues and their non–African-American classmates. Yet as is the case for all those who have managed to scale the heights of corporate America, it wasn’t simply personal strengths and talents that got them there. It was the willingness and ability of others to recognize, support, and develop those strengths and talents. We wish to speak to both elements of success.

“I think the experience of being black in America creates resilience—a steady steadiness. And it creates courage and pride. Not pride in a boastful way, but being proud, as you need to be in moments when you feel completely rejected, completely ignored, overlooked, sidelined.”

—A senior executive of a Fortune 50 financial services firm

Too often we see business leaders struggle to advance members of underrepresented groups because they model their development strategies on their own paths to success. They believe they’re good at spotting and supporting talent, but their support is informed by their own experience: “I looked like that five years ago, and this is what I needed to grow into the next level.” Our research suggests that company leaders are best able to recognize talent and understand others’ development needs when those talents and needs present themselves as theirs did; they often overlook—or are baffled by how to develop—talent that looks different. So in our study we asked: What lessons can aspiring leaders—specifically, women of color and members of other underrepresented groups—take from the careers of highly successful African-American women? Moreover, what can corporate leaders learn about how to spot and develop black women’s talents, and what might such lessons teach us about how to cultivate the talents of underrepresented groups more generally?

Stand With Breonna

Breonna was asleep at home when a rogue task-force of the Louisville police broke down her door in the middle of the night and murdered her. They were attempting an illegal drug raid in the wrong neighborhood for a suspect that they'd already arrested earlier that day.

The police officers have yet to be arrested or charged. Breonna's family saw no progress in their fight for justice, so they reached out to our team at the Action PAC. We need all hands on deck!!!

Add your name: We’re calling on the Louisville Metro Police Department to terminate the police involved, and for a special prosecutor to be appointed to bring forward charges against the officers and oversee all parts of this case. We’re demanding that the Louisville Metro Council pass new rules banning the use of no-knock raids like the one used to break into Breonna’s home.

Since the launch of this petition, Commonwealth Attorney Tom Wine has recused himself from the investigation into the LMPD conduct that night, the FBI is now investigating the killing of Breonna Taylor, the LMPD Police Chief, Steve Conrad, announced his retirement, and all charges have been dropped against Breonna’s boyfriend, Kenny Walker, but our work is not done.