Ayanna Pressley Biography
Who Is Ayanna Pressley?
A Chicago native, Ayanna Pressley moved to Boston to attend faculty, and started her political profession working for Congressman Joseph P. Kennedy II, earlier than working for then-Senator John Kerry in varied roles for 13 years. Before her election to Congress, the place she turned a part of a gaggle generally known as “The Squad,” Pressley served because the Boston City Council’s first elected girl of shade.
Early Life and Education
Born in Cincinnati, Ohio on February 3, 1974, and raised in what she described as a “tough” Chicago neighborhood, Ayanna Soyini Pressley is the only child of tenants’ rights organizer Sandra Pressley and Martin Terrell, who struggled with heroin dependancy and spent 16 years out and in of jail. Pressley’s father later overcame his dependancy and have become a printed writer.
She attended Chicago’s personal Francis W. Parker School, the place she served as class president from seventh grade by means of her senior yr. A cheerleader and debater, she was chosen as her graduating class’s graduation speaker, and was named “most likely to be mayor of Chicago.”
While rising up Pressley additionally modeled and did voiceover work, even showing in Planned Parenthood adverts that ran on Chicago’s metropolis busses.
In 1992, she moved to Boston, Massachusetts to attend Boston University, however by no means graduated, withdrawing from the school in 1994 to assist her household after her mom misplaced her job as an govt assistant at Time Warner. After leaving the University, Bush labored as a receptionist and a barback and served banquets on the Boston Marriott Copley Place.
Political Career
Pressley labored for Congressman Kennedy for 2 years, first as an unpaid intern in his Roxbury workplace whereas in faculty, after which as a paid staffer serving to seniors entry Social Security advantages.
After volunteering for then-Senator Kerry’s 1996 reelection marketing campaign, she went on to work for the eventual Secretary of State for 13 years in quite a lot of roles, together with constituency director and political director. “Ayanna was a force,” Kerry instructed The Boston Globe in 2018. “She had enormous focus and drive, a wonderful, outgoing personality, and believed in public service.”
In 2009, she stepped down as Kerry’s worker to launch an at-large campaign for Boston City Council. When Pressley was elected on November 3, 2009, she made historical past as the primary girl of shade ever elected to the council. With profitable reelection campaigns in 2011 and 2013, she once more made historical past as the primary particular person of shade and the primary girl in 30 years to prime the ticket. While serving within the function, she created the Committee on Healthy Women, Families, and Communities to highlight steady households, cut back violence and poverty, and promote ladies’s points.
Pressley was elected to symbolize Massachusetts’ seventh Congressional District within the U.S. House of Representatives in November 2018, unseating 10-term congressman, Michael Capuano. Along with fellow representatives Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez of New York, Ilhan Omar of Minnesota and Rashida Tlaib of Michigan, she turned generally known as one in all The Squad.
“The Squad, as we define it, is anyone who is building a more equitable and just world,” she instructed The Washington Post in 2020. “So that is more than four people. The Squad is big. Think of us as representatives of a larger community. The very first one-minute [speech] that I gave on the floor, I said, ‘I come as one, and I stand as thousands.’ That’s Maya Angelou. That’s what the Squad is to me. But it’s something that some people have tried to negatively co-opt. And, again, to weaponize.”
Alopecia
In January 2020, Pressley revealed in a video for The Root that she has alopecia, the official medical time period for baldness, based on the American Academy of Dermatology. “I’ve only been bald in the privacy of my home and in the company of close friends,” she explained, adding that she felt it was important to be transparent to help others dealing with the same diagnosis.
Pressley shared that her last bit of hair fell out in December 2019. “I’m making peace with having alopecia,” she said. “I’m very early in my alopecia journey. But I’m making progress day-after-day… It’s about self-agency, it is about energy, it is about acceptance.”
Sexual Assault
Pressley revealed in 2011 that she had been raped each throughout childhood and when she was a 19-year-old Boston University scholar. According to The Boston Globe, she was working as a resident assistant the summer time after her freshman yr somebody she knew raped her, however she by no means reported the assault due to the social isolation and disgrace she felt.
She described how the expertise formed her later life in Jessica Valenti and Jaclyn Friedman’s January 2020-released anthology, Believe Me: How Trusting Women Can Change the World: “I want a world where survivors are believed and validated and supported. I also want a world where within a generation the number of those impacted by sexual violence plummets.”
Husband and Family
Pressley met husband Conan Harris, then the supervisor of an anti-violence initiative referred to as StreetSafe Boston, in 2011, and the pair married three years later in 2014. She turned a stepmom to Harris’ daughter, Cora, calling her function as a “bonus mom” a present. “It was inferred that by calling Cora my step-daughter, I am creating a distinction or a step down,” she tweeted of her “healthy blended family” in 2019. “There is no distinction in my heart and she is without question my child.”
Before assembly Pressley, Harris, who labored as a public security aide to Boston Mayor Martin J. Walsh earlier than turning into govt director of My Brother’s Keeper Boston, spent 10 years in jail for drug trafficking. In 2020, he testified earlier than the House Subcommittee on Crime, Terrorism, and Homeland Security on boundaries to creating a profitable return from jail and reintegrating into communities.