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Topic: Black Elected OfficialsResearch
November 2011
This fact sheet provides information on the history of the Joint Center's Black Elected Officials (BEOs) Roster, its importance, and its transition to an electronic format.
November 2011
Following the election of President Barack Obama, many political observers – especially conservative ones — suggested that the United States is now a post-racial society. Three years later, in the region of the country where most African Americans live, the South, there is strong statistical evidence that politics is resegregating, with African Americans once again excluded from power...
News
January 2013
Virginia’s Third District Congressman Robert “Bobby” Scott, a Democrat, joined the chorus of Representatives who voted against the recently pass legislation which allowed the Congress and the White House to avoid going over the fiscal cliff on New Year’s Day.
Scott said the legislation would add trillion of dollars to the existing federal deficit and may force...
January 2013
African-American members of the U.S. House of Representatives recently held its special inauguration ceremony with new members, a new chairman and a renewed sense of commitment to continue the fight to ensure equality for blacks.
More than 300 people packed the U.S. Capitol Visitor Center's Congressional Auditorium to witness the Congressional Black Caucus Foundation's biannual "A...
December 2012
As the nation's first African-American president, Barack Obama benefited from and expanded his party's enormous advantage among minority voters.
But as he prepares to start his second term, Obama hasn't managed to usher in behind him many Democrats who are minorities to top elected office. Conversely, Republicans — despite their highly limited support among non-Anglo voters...
December 2012
During the Congressional Black Caucus legislative week in 2004, there was a fundraising reception held for a young black politician from Chicago who hoped to represent his state in the U.S. Senate. The honorary chairs of the fundraiser were Reps. Jesse Jackson Jr. (D-Ill.), Harold Ford Jr. (D-Tenn.), Artur Davis (D-Ala.) and Kendrick Meek (D-Fla.). They helped raise money for Barack Obama, who...
December 2012
One month after the re-election of President Barack Obama, more than 40 Black leaders convened this week to begin crafting what appears to be a strategy by which to hold politicians accountable to a suffering Black community that has given overwhelming political allegiance to President Obama and the Democratic Party.
“We just concluded a historic four-hour discussion about the state of...
November 2012
In 2011, as Illinois politicians redrew congressional district maps, they exercised a power grab that was intended to protect those already in office or even gain more seats for Democrats.
Officials split some of the state's growing Latino population between districts already represented by Democrats and those where they hoped to see Republicans lose. An incumbent Democrat like former...
November 2012
When black voters gave President Barack Obama 93 percent support on Election Day in defiance of predictions that they might sit it out this year, black leaders breathed a collective sigh of relief.
That encouraged those leaders to try to leverage more attention from both Obama and Congress. Although they waver over how much to demand from the president — particularly in light of defeated...
November 2012
President Obama won a second term last week, but it wasn’t a great week for other African-American candidates.
Despite Obama’s big win, there remain no black senators, only one African-American was even nominated for major statewide office, and black candidates lost seven of eight competitive House races — six of them by very close margins.
The end result: the number of...
Archived Research
May 1, 2005
On April 20, 2005, the Joint Center, with support from the AT&T Foundation, hosted a town hall meeting entitled Rising African American Leaders: Challenges for a New Generation. In a lively and thought-provoking discussion moderated by Joe Madison, the eight panelists agreed that while conditions have significantly improved, racism still permeates our institutions and rising African American...
January 1, 2001
This is a report on a national survey of black elected officials which was conducted as part of the Joint Center's Divergent Generations Project. The Divergent Generations Project seeks to document differences in political participation and public policy views associated with generational change in the black population. While previous research for this project has focused on the black population...
January 1, 2000
Between January 1998 and January 1999, the number of black elected officials (BEOs) in the U.S. increased by 68, from 8,868 to 8,936, a 0.8 percent increase (Table 1). In 1970, the first year in which the Joint Center collected data on BEOs, there were 1,469 BEOs. The 1999 total of 8,936 black elected officials represents a historic high. The largest categorical increase in BEOs between 1998 and...
January 1, 1999
Since last year, when the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies published Black Elected Officials: A Statistical Summary, 1993-1997, the number of black elected officials (BEOs) in the United States increased by 212, from 8,658 to 8,868, a 2.4 percent increase over the previous year (Table 1). In 1970, the first year in which the Joint Center collected data on these officials, there...
May 1, 2002
The last edition of Black Elected Officials: A Statistical Summary showed that as of January 2000, the number of black elected officials (BEOs) in the U.S. was 9,040. This edition, which records the most current complete data for those in office as of January 2001 shows that in the intervening year,the number of BEOs rose by 61 to reach 9,101, a 0.7 percent increase over the previous year (Table...
January 1, 2001
The first edition of Black Elected Officials: A National Roster was published 32 years ago, when it was reported that there were 1,469 black elected officials (BEOs) in the United States. This newest edition of Black Elected Officials (which covers officials in office as of January 31, 2000) reports 9,040 BEOs, a more than six-fold increase. Growth over this period is especially impressive at the...
