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Black Lives Matter activist wins in Iowa on ‘defund the police’ platform

A 27-year-old Black Lives Matter activist ousted a two-term incumbent on Tuesday to win a seat on the Des Moines City Council, in contrast to other racial justice organizers who lost races elsewhere...

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Indira Sheumaker

By Carol Ozemhoya

A 27-year-old Black Lives Matter activist ousted a two-term incumbent on Tuesday to win a seat on the Des Moines City Council, in contrast to other racial justice organizers who lost races elsewhere, reports NBC News.

Indira Sheumaker earned 46 percent of the vote in Tuesday’s election, defeating Ward 1 incumbent Bill Gray, who had 36 percent of the vote, according to initial returns for the nonpartisan race. Sheumaker, who has no prior political experience, ran on a platform that included defunding the police and decriminalizing marijuana in the capital city of Iowa, which has increasingly become a Republican-controlled state. She will be the only person of color on the City Council, and the only member younger than 30.

“We’d been talked down to a lot by people saying, ‘You can’t win on defund’ — we said let’s see if that’s true,” Sheumaker said in an interview.

“We won on defund because people were inspired by our message, they wanted somebody who wasn’t afraid,” she continued. “And we didn’t win saying we want to make Des Moines less safe, we ran saying we wanted to make Des Moines more safe, and that is the message of defund.”

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