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Jamaal Bowman’s Background in Advocacy Helped Build Winning Campaign Network

Jamaal Bowman’s Background in Advocacy Helped Build Winning Campaign Network

Jamaal Bowman, the 44-year-old former middle school principal who pulled off an upset win over longtime congressman Eliot Engel in New York’s Democratic primary, concedes he’s been on an unlikely journey.

”I’m a Black man who was raised by a single mother in a housing project. That story doesn’t usually end in Congress,” Bowman said in a statement released by his campaign. “But today, that 11-year-old boy who was beaten by police is about to be your next Representative.”

Jamaal Bowman’s Background in Advocacy Helped Build Winning Campaign Network

Bowman’s victory in the primary for a safe Democratic seat that represents parts of Westchester County and the Bronx showed that Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s toppling of an entrenched White incumbent in a neighboring district two years ago wasn’t a fluke.

Another Black progressive candidate, Mondaire Jones, won an eight-way race to replace 16-term Representative Nita Lowey, who is retiring. New York City Councilman Ritchie Torres had a significant edge in another crowded contest to succeed Representative Jose Serrano, who was first elected in 1990 and also is retiring.

Bowman supports the broader agenda of the Democratic Party’s progressive wing: the Green New Deal, Medicare for All and a New Deal for Housing, ideas that have received criticism from moderate Democrats as well as from Republicans. He’s also taken an active role in the push for racial justice following the death of George Floyd while in custody of Minneapolis police.

“The world has changed. Congress needs to change, too,” Bowman said in his Friday statement. “But if we can take on entrenched power and wealthy interests here in Westchester and the Bronx, then we can do it all across this country.”

Bowman emerged early on as one of two leading primary challengers to Engel, then won the key endorsement of Justice Democrats, the progressive activist group that had backed Ocasio-Cortez.

“We thought he was the best shot to take on someone difficult to beat,” Waleed Shahid, Justice Democrats’ communications director, said in an interview last year.

Jamaal Bowman’s Background in Advocacy Helped Build Winning Campaign Network

He said Bowman’s biography and experience in the community gave him an edge over others who sought the group’s backing. Bowman’s past work on school testing and equitable school funding had helped him build a network among activists.

Bowman’s career led him by 2000 to become the founding principal of the Cornerstone Academy for Social Action, a public middle school. He has also been involved for years with the Campaign for Fiscal Equity, which had sued New York state over unequal school spending. He has opposed the standardized testing that is a vestige of the No Child Left Behind education law.

In an interview with Spectrum News NY1 last year, Bowman said he decided to jump into politics because, “I just don’t understand how we can live in the wealthiest country in the world and still have 15.5 million children living in poverty.”

Bowman said in an interview with Bloomberg News last year that he thought he could win by motivating voters in the district who’ve felt left out, mostly the 40% of the population in the Bronx. The rest of the district’s residents are in southern Westchester County.

Mobilizing those voters, many of whom hadn’t engaged with Engel, would be key, Bowman said.

Jamaal Bowman’s Background in Advocacy Helped Build Winning Campaign Network

“It leads you to think there’s actually a capacity to mobilize and bring people into the fold, especially in the Bronx, who have historically not been voting,” he said. “Having been born from the district, lived my whole life here, I have an authenticity and understanding of the diversity of the district -- all the communities in the district.”

Bowman spent the first seven years of his life in a public housing development, the East River Houses, with his grandmother. His mother was single and he had two older sisters.

He told the Amsterdam News in 2016 that he would stay with his grandmother during the week and with his mother on the weekends. He told that newspaper he was “so thankful and blessed” from his upbringing.

Bowman received an undergraduate degree in sports management from the University of New Haven in May 1999.

He began teaching in 1999 in the south Bronx. His first job came in a high-need area of the the south Bronx, he told the Amsterdam News. He also did organizing work on education issues.

He lives in Yonkers, New York, with his wife and three children.

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