Attica Scott, the only Black woman in the Kentucky legislature, is certain that change is coming, whether the Democratic Party is ready for it or not. onesarahjones reports
Photo: Amy Harris/Shutterstock Attica Scott was trying to get to church in Louisville, Kentucky, when the police closed in. It was the night of September 24, one day after the state’s Republican attorney general announced that a grand jury would not indict three Louisville police officers in the killing of Breonna Taylor. Incensed, Scott and her teenage daughter, Ashanti, joined protesters in the streets of their hometown.
Her arrest made national news, and the headlines betrayed a note of shock: Hadn’t anyone recognized a sitting state representative probably hadn’t rioted her way through the streets of Louisville? What were the police thinking? Other than the detail of her office, Scott’s experiences are not anomalous. Law enforcement across the country violently suppressed summertime protests over the killings of Taylor, George Floyd, and so many other Black people by police.
I asked her why she thought Kentucky Democrats didn’t react more forcefully to her arrest. “I don’t know, and quite honestly, I haven’t reached out to them. Because this has been a traumatic experience,” she responded. She did receive a supportive text message from a state Democratic staff member, but she’d hoped for more. The Kentucky Democratic Party did not return emailed requests for comment.
Most elected officials will tell you, if you ask them, that they entered politics to serve the public. But Scott was practically born into it. Her parents named her in honor of the 1971 Attica prison riot, which took place the year before she was born; authorities killed 29 inmates who’d taken over a New York prison to protest inhumane conditions. The circumstances behind her namesake uprising still weigh heavily on her. “That was my parents’ Mike Brown.
Scott still wrestles with a state Republican Party tilting far right along with President Trump, and a Democratic Party that, as she puts it, takes its base for granted. She is the author of Breonna’s Law, which would ban no-knock warrants like the one the Louisville police used to enter Taylor’s apartment without warning. “Eleven of the 100 members of the Kentucky House of Representatives have signed,” she said.
“When you disregard Black people, who are in your base for so many decades, and write us off and assume that we are going to vote for your candidates just because they are Democrats, you’ve already lost,” Scott told me. She provides a recent example: Amy McGrath’s campaign for Senate. McGrath is a fundraising wonder, raising more than $46 million in her race against Mitch McConnell. But most of the donations have come from out of state, and McConnell leads McGrath by double digits.
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