Mandela Barnes’s Last Punch
NORTH MILWAUKEE, Wis.—Just three weeks before Election Day, inside a neoclassical bank building turned café, Mandela Barnes, the lieutenant governor of Wisconsin and Democratic nominee for Senate, sat at a table listening to nine Black women share their birthing stories. They spoke of miscarriages, hospitals that ignored their pleas for help as they labored, and postpartum depression. They said they wanted him to be a deciding vote to provide more support for doulas, Medicaid funding for care after birth, and other priorities that might improve the lives of Black women.
“There are not enough people who want to take the time to consider what somebody else’s life has been like,” Barnes said. “And they want to bastardize people because of decisions that had to be made.” As he began talking about his plans, two gunshots
