(The Root) — From Selma to the Ivy League to Oxford to Wall Street to Congress — that is the improbable but impressive arc of Terri Sewell’s life. On Tuesday, Nov. 2, she became the first black woman elected to Congress from Alabama. Bull Connor must be writhing in the afterlife, and his nemesis Martin Luther King Jr. must be smiling. “I offer a voice for rural America,” says Sewell, 45, a partner in the 200-person Birmingham law firm of Maynard, Cooper and Gale. “I have probably wanted to represent this district all my life.” She grew up in Selma, the heart of Alabama’s Black Belt, but spent much of her childhood summers with her grandparents in Lowndes County, known back in the day as “Bloody Lowndes” and as the place where the Black Panther Party began to take shape. She says she shucked plenty of corn and cut down lots of sugar cane during those summers.
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