- Feb 9, 2001
- 7,136
- 2,071
"The rate of Black females being elected to public office in America has surpassed Black males by 5-1 over the past 30 years, according to a study made public this week by the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies.
“In sum, the trends have dramatically changed from the early 1970s when about 82 percent of newly elected Black elected officials were men. In the post-1995 period, 85 percent of the growth in the number of Black elected officials was from Black women being elected to office,” observes the report, “Black Elected Officials: A Statistical Summary 2001.”
The news is exciting to C. Delores Tucker, founder and chair of the National Congress of Black Women, Inc. (NCBW), a Silver Spring, Md.-based group that encourages women to engage in political activism.
“We are the caretakers of the family, even the men. We raise presidents and we raise governors,” says Tucker, who served seven years as Pennsylvania’s first Black female secretary of state. “We work at it. Women work at things and the men, unfortunately, they have been so deprived by the culture and by the system here that they have not been able to move as fast as women.”
According to David Bositis, the Joint Center researcher who authored the study, most of the recent progress for Black women has taken place at the county levels, where Black women are being elected to city councils and school boards. At that level, there was an increase of 22 positions, a 2.3 percent rise between 2000 and 2001.
“It’s more a question of why Black women are doing well as opposed to why the number of Black men are declining,” Bositis says. He speculates that women not only tend to vote in greater numbers, but in the Democratic Party – which receives an overwhelming majority of the Black vote – women are more politically active than men.
As for the men, Bositis says, several social variables have apparently caused the rate of Black male elections to slow.
“Black women are attending college at higher rates than Black men,” Bositis says. “And, you’ve got criminal justice issues.”
At the end of 2000, more Black men were behind bars (791,600) than were enrolled in colleges or universities (603,032), according to the Justice Policy Institute, a think tank that advocates alternatives to prison.
There are demographic reasons for the gap as well.
Tucker cites U. S. Census reports that show that women are more likely to vote than men. Further, the voting-age population of women exceeded men by nearly 9 million in 2000."
Source: http://www.indyevents.com/cgibin/indy/index.pl/noframes/read/1969
Queenie
“In sum, the trends have dramatically changed from the early 1970s when about 82 percent of newly elected Black elected officials were men. In the post-1995 period, 85 percent of the growth in the number of Black elected officials was from Black women being elected to office,” observes the report, “Black Elected Officials: A Statistical Summary 2001.”
The news is exciting to C. Delores Tucker, founder and chair of the National Congress of Black Women, Inc. (NCBW), a Silver Spring, Md.-based group that encourages women to engage in political activism.
“We are the caretakers of the family, even the men. We raise presidents and we raise governors,” says Tucker, who served seven years as Pennsylvania’s first Black female secretary of state. “We work at it. Women work at things and the men, unfortunately, they have been so deprived by the culture and by the system here that they have not been able to move as fast as women.”
According to David Bositis, the Joint Center researcher who authored the study, most of the recent progress for Black women has taken place at the county levels, where Black women are being elected to city councils and school boards. At that level, there was an increase of 22 positions, a 2.3 percent rise between 2000 and 2001.
“It’s more a question of why Black women are doing well as opposed to why the number of Black men are declining,” Bositis says. He speculates that women not only tend to vote in greater numbers, but in the Democratic Party – which receives an overwhelming majority of the Black vote – women are more politically active than men.
As for the men, Bositis says, several social variables have apparently caused the rate of Black male elections to slow.
“Black women are attending college at higher rates than Black men,” Bositis says. “And, you’ve got criminal justice issues.”
At the end of 2000, more Black men were behind bars (791,600) than were enrolled in colleges or universities (603,032), according to the Justice Policy Institute, a think tank that advocates alternatives to prison.
There are demographic reasons for the gap as well.
Tucker cites U. S. Census reports that show that women are more likely to vote than men. Further, the voting-age population of women exceeded men by nearly 9 million in 2000."
Source: http://www.indyevents.com/cgibin/indy/index.pl/noframes/read/1969
Queenie