These Women Made a Database of Black Women Running for Office in 2018

The list of over 100 candidates, spearheaded by writer Luvvie Ajayi, bodes well for those hoping to see more black women in office in the near future.

On December 14—the day after 63 percent of white women in Alabama voted for pedophilia-accused republican Roy Moore while 98 percent of black women voted for democrat Doug Jones—popular blogger and author Luvvie Ajayi posted a link to her Facebook and Twitter accounts that led to a list containing the names and websites of over 100 black women running for office in the United States in 2018. Ajayi wrote on Twitter that she had been looking such a list herself, but couldn’t find one. So, she teamed up with creative consultant Lucrecer Braxton, blogger Sili Recio, and Candace Jones to start one.

The team formed after Ajayi posted in a Facebook group she had made to promote her book, I’m Judging You: The Do-Better Manual, asking for volunteer help. Working collaboratively online from different cities across the country, the four acquaintances began working off of a list of around sixty names that had been started by journalist Jeff Yang and passed off to Ajayi. The women then went through the list, adding in links to websites, donation pages, and social media accounts, as well as dozens more candidates crowd-sourced through social media. The list is currently hosted on Ajayi’s own website, but the group plans to migrate it to its own website eventually.

“Mainly, we just started doing it so that people could start doing some research and know who was out there,” Braxton tells Broadly. “It’s been good to hear some people say they actually had no idea that they had someone running in their district.”

It turns out that others were hungry for the same information; Ajayi’s posts quickly went viral. As of publishing, her tweet has over 22,000 retweets and 42,000 “likes.”

“We saw that there was a need for something that wasn’t there,” is Braxton’s short explanation for the excitement.

After the database was out in the world, suggested additions started pouring in via all of the organizers’ online channels. Soon, they set up a submission form so that people can include all of the information about the candidate, rather than just tweeting a name. Still, all the information needs to be added to the list manually, and the collaborators warn that they can only go so fast, and plan to take a break over the …

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