When Bettie J. Parker was born in 1948 in Elizabeth City, North Carolina, the state was segregated. Growing up, Parker was not allowed to use the city’s public swimming pools, drinking fountains, bowling alleys, or certain public restrooms.
Sixty-nine years later in 2017—and after a 33-year career as a math teacher at the city’s high school—Parker was elected as its mayor. She is the first woman to hold the position. “I didn't even think about my age,” Parker tells Forbes of her decision to run for office. “It was a burning in my spirit to do something beyond what I had already done to help people.”
Parker is part of the recent wave of women who’ve felt a similar call to service, running for and winning state and federal political office in record numbers. She is also representative of a cohort of women who are over the age of 50 and shattering age and gender norms—women who Forbes and “Know Your Value” will highlight in a new weekly segment on Morning Joe. This week’s spotlight goes to women who, after decades building careers in other arenas, ran for political office and won.
These are the four women over 50 who came out of nowhere to get elected:
Representative Lisa McClain, 54: McClain spent three decades working in financial services, first at American Express and then at the Michigan-based Hantz Group, which she helped start in 1998. The mother of four and lifelong Republican was never active in party politics, but is a political “junkie” who wholeheartedly supported President Trump and frequently aired her political views over dinners with her family. During one of these mealtime conversations, in October 2019, her daughter essentially dared her to run for office.
"My youngest looked at me and said, ‘Well, mom, if you don’t like it, why don’t you get in there and do something about it?’” McClain told the Detroit News last summer. After talking it through with her husband, she decided to run for the congressional seat in Michigan’s 10th district.
The district’s primary race turned into Michigan’s most expensive primary last year, but McClain prevailed there and in the general election, where she beat Democrat Kimberly Bizon with 66% of the vote.
Representative Lucy McBath, 60: Now the Democratic representative for Georgia’s sixth district—a seat once held by Newt Gingrich—McBath didn’t start her career in politics. She had been a Delta flight attendant for 30 years until her son, Jordan Davis, was shot and killed in a gas station parking lot in 2012 by a man who thought the music in Davis’s car was “too loud.” McBath decided to dedicate the rest of her life to preventing other families from losing their loved ones to gun violence, so she became the national spokesperson and faith and outreach leader for Everytown for Gun Safety and Moms Demand Action for Gun Sense in America.
In 2017, after the mass shooting at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, Florida, killed 17 people, McBath wanted to do more. Community organizing has its place, she told CNN in 2018, but she realized “you’ve got to have people on the inside [of government] that are willing to do the work, creating the bills and initiatives, who will push the issue.”
In the midterm elections later that year, McBath defeated Republican incumbent Karen Handel by 3,200 votes. In 2020, she secured reelection (again running against Handel) with 54.6% of the vote, a 9.2% margin of victory.
Representative Maria Elvira Salazar, 59: A five-time Emmy Award-winning journalist for Spanish-language television, Salazar wasn’t a newbie to public life when she first ran to represent Florida’s 27th Congressional district in 2018. “I feel that I’m more than ready; 35 years of journalism and covering the most important political figures of our time got me ready," she has said, portraying her interviews with Fidel Castro and Nicolas Maduro as going toe to toe with “corrupt elites.”
Though Salazar lost the 2018 race to Democrat Donna Shalala by six percentage points, she was victorious in their 2020 rematch, winning by nearly three points (an upset that surprised most political observers). Her win was fueled by an endorsement from President Trump and a surge of Cuban-American and Republican voters in Miami-Dade County.
Mayor Bettie J. Parker of Elizabeth City, NC, is the first woman to hold the position of mayor in the town's history.
courtesy of Mayor Bettie J. ParkerElizabeth City, N.C. Mayor Bettie J. Parker, 72: The “unsung hero” of this group, Parker presides over a town with less than 20,000 inhabitants. She doesn’t have much of a national profile, but what she does have is a story of courage in the face of systemic racism.
“Segregation was actually really deep,” Parker says of her childhood in Elizabeth City, noting that she didn’t attend an integrated school until she went to college. “I suffered a lot of pain as a youngster coming through and being denied things. But I did not let it engulf me. I did not let pain have the last word.”
Parker’s first taste of politics came in 2014, when she was 66 years old and elected as a county commissioner—the first African American woman since Reconstruction to do so, by her accounting. This victory emboldened Parker; suddenly, becoming mayor didn’t seem quite so outside the realm of possibilities, even if it didn’t seem easy. “I thought, ‘you're Black and a woman, you're never gonna win in this town,’” Parker says about some of her doubts before running for mayor. “But I know this town; I taught probably two-thirds of this town. They know me.”
This instinct proved to be correct. Running with a campaign slogan that was “Retired, Inspired, Qualified, and ready to serve all the citizens of Elizabeth City as your next Mayor,” Parker prevailed in both the 2017 Democratic mayoral primary and the general election. In November, she won reelection with a whopping 94% of the vote.
She hopes these successes serve as inspiration for other women who feel they still have more to give. “Serve somebody, because that's where you get the energy and the strength,” Parker says. “Don’t let age lock you out.”
Do you know a woman who is over the age of 50 and has achieved a “first” or broken a barrier? In partnership with Mika Brzezinski and her “Know Your Value” initiative, we are committed to shining a light on 50 diverse women over the age of 50 who have achieved significant success later in life, often by overcoming formidable odds or barriers. Nominate that person for the 50 Over 50 here, today. We are accepting submissions until February 28, 2021.
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Political Firsts Over 50: Women Who Came Out Of Nowhere To Get Elected - Forbes
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