Andrea Campbell Set To Become Massachusetts’ First Black Attorney General After Win

Andrea Campbell defeated her Republican opponent Tuesday night to become the first Black attorney general in Massachusetts history.

WBUR reports Campbell’s win continues a swift rise for the Black woman in the state. Campbell was a former Boston city councilor who finished third in the city’s mayoral primary last year.

According to The New York Times, Campbell won 62.3% of the vote, receiving more than one million votes in her favor. Campbell’s opponent, Trump-backed Jay McMahon, who ran on a tough-on-crime and anti-immigration agenda, received less than 40% of the vote.

In her victory speech, Campbell said her election victory belongs to the residents of Massachusetts and added that she is just getting started.

“This moment, this win, our win, is a culmination of hard work, purpose-driven work and I am so ready to go to work on behalf of the commonwealth and on behalf of all of you as the next attorney general.”

Campbell campaigned on a promise to protect abortion rights in the state and enforce strong oversight over the police, using the story of her own life to connect with Massachusetts voters.

The Princeton and UCLA graduate’s father cycled through the revolving doors of prison, and her mother died in a car accident on her way to visit their father in prison when she and her brother Andre were eight months old.

At the time, Campbell’s father was serving eight years, meaning she and Andre were cared for by family members and spent time in foster homes. Andre died in police custody awaiting trial in 2012 at 29.

“Growing up, I would just often look at my brothers and say, get it together and go to school,” the Massachusetts resident said in 2019, according to MassInc. “I almost felt as if I was a mother figure. Do your work. It was more complex than that, and you don’t see that until you gain some level of maturity.

“I no longer blame individual people. I look at systems as a whole” and “how they don’t show up for the most vulnerable, and the inequities in those systems. And I try to peel that apart a little bit, using not just my story but the stories of many others in the communities I serve.”