The Crusader Newspaper Group

LaTosha Brown to keynote Black Women Economic And Political Power Breakfast

Brown, who worked tirelessly to help Stacey Abrams
become the nation’s first Black woman governor,
talks about the divided woman’s vote

Once again, white women voters in Georgia didn’t vote in their own best interests during the midterm election for governor. Instead, 76 percent of white women voted for Republican Secretary of State Brian Kemp over Stacey Abrams, who was running to become the nation’s first African-American woman governor. By comparison, 97 percent of Black women voted for Abrams.

Georgia is one of eight states that opted out of expanding Medicaid to low-income adults. While Abrams wanted to extend Medicaid to cover the nearly half a million more Georgians who would benefit from it, Kemp opposes the expansion in a state where hospitals and drugstores are closing in rural parts of the state.

During the midterm elections, LaTosha Brown, co-founder of the Black Voters Matter Fund says she crisscrossed the South, focusing on progressive pockets in red states to find people who have been ignored.

2018 IBWLC Black Womens Power Invite-FEight rural hospitals have closed in Georgia since 2008, more than in any other state except Texas and Tennessee, according to Brown in an op-ed column for The New York Times. “We asked a nursing assistant whose family member had to drive 100 miles to get to the nearest hospital, ‘Do you know what’s happening with Medicaid?’ She didn’t. So we explained that if Georgia followed the more than 30 states that have expanded Medicaid, rural hospitals could stay open and it could create thousands of new health care jobs. Her face lit up. She walked across the street to our bus and filled out a voter registration form. And she persuaded her friend to do the same.”

Brown says Black women are literally carrying and leading the progressive vote and the progressive transformation in this country.

“Black women have always done the work, but to stand in the space of leadership is something we’ve never seen at this level before,” states Brown, who along with co-founder, Cliff Albright, was instrumental in the Alabama senate victory by Doug Jones. Ninety-eight percent of black women voted for Jones.

Brown will be the featured speaker at the Black Women’s Economic and Political Power breakfast hosted by the Ida B. Wells Legacy Committee, Monday, Dec. 10, 2018, at the 4C Social Hall, 4910 S. King Dr., from 7:30 a.m. – 9:30 a.m. Tickets are $50. For more information, call 312-948-9951 or buy tickets online at www.idaslegacy.com.

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