Austin Davis was just a teenager when the trajectory of his life changed forever. A fatal shooting rattled his neighborhood in the working class Pennsylvania town of McKeesport, and spurred him to attend a city council meeting of all white officials who were skeptical of the concerned Black teenager raising his voice. “ The people closest to the pain should be closest to the power,” Davis says. “ I had a stake in that community just as much as they did as somebody who lived there and grew up there, and I wanted to make it a better place.”
Nearly two decades later Davis was elected the Lieutenant Governor of Pennsylvania, becoming the first African American to ever hold the office and the youngest Lieutenant Governor in the United States. On this episode of Paternal, Davis recounts how the son of a bus driver and hairdresser rose to one of the most powerful positions in Pennsylvania, why becoming a father helped him focus his energy on fixing the state’s childcare problem, and where he finds hope for the future despite extreme partisanship and vitriol among today’s politicians.
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