The House of Representatives has never had a Black speaker. Next year it is expected to, because Democrats took the chamber in the midterms and Hakeem Jeffries, 56, leads them.
His colleagues vote when the new Congress convenes on Jan. 3, 2027. Democrats are on track for at least 224 seats, well past the 218 needed, after Republicans lost 25 seats to them, including some the party had counted as safe. Outgoing Speaker Mike Johnson’s majority is gone.
The Capitol is a building where enslaved African Americans labored. Joseph Rainey of South Carolina, the first Black member elected to the House, took his seat there in 1870 and never held the gavel. Jeffries would be the highest-ranking Black elected official serving in the country, and the first Black person to hold a post the Constitution itself requires.
He has already broken one barrier. In 2023 he became the first Black lawmaker to lead a party in Congress, succeeding Nancy Pelosi. He represents the Brooklyn district once held by Shirley Chisholm, the first Black woman elected to Congress, and he won it in 2012 by beating a 30-year incumbent.
For Black readers, the title matters less than what the speaker controls: which bills reach the floor, which investigations get subpoenas and which budgets get written. Jeffries has said Democrats will open with a 100-day agenda to lower living costs and to launch oversight and investigations of the Trump administration. He framed the moment this way: “This is not a partisan moment. This is a patriotic one.”
That agenda is where he will be measured. Black families spent the last two years watching Washington cut food aid, strip enforcement from civil rights offices and delete race from federal data. A Black speaker who only presides over that fight has not delivered for them. One who puts the Voting Rights Act, food assistance and civil rights enforcement on the House floor in the first hundred days has.
Katherine Clark of Massachusetts is expected to be majority leader and Pete Aguilar of California majority whip. The speaker vote is Jan. 3.
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