Black women are poised for historic congressional gains in November

Black women candidates could make historic gains in the November midterm elections. That’s good news for all Americans, because it’s a sign our country is overcoming centuries of racism and sexism to take advantage of everyone’s talents.

Data shared with me by Rutgers’ Center for American Women in Politics and Higher Heights shows that with nearly all primaries concluded, 77 Black women have secured spots on midterm ballots as candidates for the U.S. House and Senate, governorships and other statewide offices. Seventy-one are Democrats.

The Black women who get elected will make America even greater than it already is because our nation’s diversity enables all types of people to combine their differing knowledge, experiences and perspectives to work together to build a better future for us all. Black women have a lot to contribute when given the chance.

A total of 44 Black women — 41 of them Democrats — have been nominated to run for the U.S. House from 20 states and the Virgin Islands. The current House session began with 27 Black women serving as representatives and two others serving as nonvoting delegates from Washington, D.C., and the Virgin Islands. All 29 are Democrats.

Four Black women Democrats have been nominated to run for the U.S. Senate in the midterms from Florida, Illinois, Oklahoma and Tennessee. Two Black women Democrats are now serving as senators from Delaware and Maryland.

Three Black women — two Democrats and a Republican — have been nominated to run for governor in Georgia , Minnesota and the Virgin Islands . No Black woman has ever served as a governor in U.S. history. Another 26 Black women have been nominated to run for other statewide offices from 16 states.

As the motto for the United Negro College Fund states: “A mind is a terrible thing to waste.” Yet centuries of slavery and continuing discrimination after emancipation prevented most Black people from gaining the education, training and opportunities they deserved to fully utilize their brainpower.

Teaching enslaved people to read and write was a crime in most Southern states, although some still managed to become literate. After slavery ended, many Black children were forced to leave school at a young age to join the workforce to help their families farm or to take low-wage jobs, which were the only jobs open to them.

In the South, school segregation was mandated as late as the early 1970s — despite a 1954 Supreme Court ruling that it was unconstitutional. Black children — including me in Louisiana — were educated in dilapidated buildings with outdated hand-me-down books discarded by better-funded white public schools.

Black girls and women have had to battle sexism as well as racism. No women of any race could vote in federal elections until the 19th Amendment to the Constitution was ratified in 1920. And millions of Black women and men in the South — including my own parents and many relatives — were barred from voting until enactment of the Voting Rights Act of 1965 .

Rep. Shirley Chisholm (D-N.Y.), the first Black woman elected to the U.S. House in 1968, battled racist and sexist views when she ran for the Democratic presidential nomination in 1972. Few took her candidacy seriously.

“I have certainly met much more discrimination in terms of being a woman than being Black in the field of politics,” she said.

When Sen. Carol Moseley Braun (D-Ill.), the first Black woman elected to the U.S. Senate in 1992, briefly ran for the 2004 Democratic presidential nomination, she said it was “time to take the men-only sign off the White House door.” Four years later, a male senator from Illinois named Barack Obama became our first (and, so far, only) Black president.

I’ve never run for public office, but I have held plenty of governmental positions at all levels. Like generations of Black women before me, I’ve spent my life being told what I could not be, where I could not go, what I should not say and how I should not look and speak. And like many Black women, I have ignored those negative messages.

Black women are rising despite all the stereotypes and insults we’re still hit with — like the claim that we only advance because of diversity, equity and inclusion policies. We just keep moving forward, raising families, building careers, strengthening communities and our nation, and showing we can be leaders as well as followers.

Just last week, right-wing provocateur Laura Loomer proved that point, attacking Florida Senate nominee Angie Nixon (D), Supreme Court Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson and several Black women in Congress — dismissing each as unqualified. It is the same insult dressed up in yesterday’s suit: If a Black woman succeeds, her success cannot be earned. We have heard it before, and we will keep answering it the same way — by leading anyway.

Black women have not suddenly become more capable. Our abilities are just finally being recognized. If more are elected in the midterms, they will help fulfill the hopes of the framers of the Constitution to “form a more perfect Union … and secure the Blessing of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity.”

Donna Brazile is a political strategist, a contributor to ABC News and former chair of the Democratic National Committee. She is the author of “ Hacks: Inside the Break-ins and Breakdowns That Put Donald Trump in the White House .”