After Primary, Rhode Island Looks Set to Have Its First Black Member of Congress

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September 5, 2023

By Kayla Guo, New York Times

“The big reason I’m running is my story,” Gabriel Amo said last week. “I call it a Rhode Island story.(Bryce Vickmark/Amo Campaign)

Gabriel Amo, a moderate Democrat who served in the Biden and Obama administrations, won a raucous Democratic special primary election in Rhode Island’s First Congressional District on Tuesday, positioning him to become the first person of color to represent the state in Congress.

Mr. Amo, who is Black, beat out 10 other Democrats to win with about one-third of the vote in the deep-blue district, all but ensuring that he would succeed former Representative David N. Cicilline, who stepped down in May to become the president of the Rhode Island Foundation.

“This primary election showed that Rhode Islanders believe in a state where one of their sons, the son of two West African immigrants, from Ghana and Liberia, could receive the love and the investments of a community and go from serving the president of United States and briefing him in the Oval Office to being the Democratic nominee for Congress in the First Congressional District,” Mr. Amo said in his victory speech on Tuesday night.

“And it is not lost on me,” he continued, “that I stand on the shoulders of giants, of so many who paved the road before me — Black, brown, women — so many people who have had the opportunity to pave a pathway so I could stand here today. And I want to acknowledge them. But we got real work ahead.”

Read more about this election.

Amo joins these other Black politicians.

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