78 DECEMBER 2019 VOGUE.COM
“We Will Never Stop”Before she ran for U.S. Congress, Lucy McBath was a grieving mom.
Now she’s one of Washington’s most relentless advocates for gun reform.
Rebecca Johnson reports. Photographed by A nnie Leibovitz.N
obody expected Lucy McBath to win.
“When I told people I wanted to run for
Congress, they’d laugh or pat me on
the arm and say, ‘Oh, isn’t that nice?’ ”
she says, leaning over and touching my
arm with her perfectly manicured nails
to make her point. To be fair, they had reason to be
skeptical. McBath, 59, was a black woman running in a
majority white suburb outside Atlanta—a Democrat
trying to win a seat that Newt Gingrich had held for
20 years. She’d spent her professional life as a flight
attendant and had never once campaigned for anything.But in a country where gun violence claims nearly
40,000 lives a year, voters—especially mothers—found
themselves listening to her.
“I just told them my story, and that was enough,” she
explains. “Because people are afraid. It’s not just black
people. It’s everyone. People are afraidUp Front
STRONGER TOGETHER
REPRESENTATIVE McBATH (SECOND FROM RIGHT)
WITH MEMBERS OF MOMS DEMAND ACTION:
JULVONNIA McDOWELL, STEPHANIE PIZZOFERRATO,
SHARMAINE BROWN, AND MARGARET BINKLEY.
SITTINGS EDITOR: CHLOE MALLE.