Andrea Campbell facts for kids

Quick facts for kids Andrea Campbell
Official portrait, 2023
45th Attorney General of Massachusetts
Incumbent
Assumed office January 18, 2023
Governor	Maura Healey
Preceded by	Maura Healey Bessie Dewar (acting)
President of the Boston City Council
In office January 2018 – January 2020
Preceded by	Michelle Wu
Succeeded by	Kim Janey
Member of the Boston City Council from the 4th district
In office January 4, 2016 – January 3, 2022
Preceded by	Charles Yancey
Succeeded by	Brian Worrell
Personal details
Born	(1982-06-11) June 11, 1982 (age 42) Boston, Massachusetts, U.S.
Political party	Democratic
Education	Princeton University (BA) University of California, Los Angeles (JD)
Website

Andrea Joy Campbell (born June 11, 1982) is an American lawyer and politician who is serving as the attorney general of Massachusetts. Campbell is a former member of the Boston City Council. On the city council, she represented District 4, which includes parts of Boston's Dorchester, Mattapan, Jamaica Plain, and Roslindale neighborhoods. A member of the Democratic Party, she was first elected to the council in November 2015 and assumed office in January 2016. She served as president of the council from January 2018 until January 2020. Campbell unsuccessfully ran for mayor of Boston in 2021, placing third in the nonpartisan primary election behind Annissa Essaibi George and Michelle Wu, the latter of whom would go on to win the general election.

In 2022, Campbell announced her candidacy in that year’s election for attorney general of Massachusetts. Campbell was the first black woman to qualify for the ballot in a statewide election in Massachusetts. Winning the Democratic Party’s nomination with a sizable win in the Democratic primary, Campbell won the general election by a large margin. In January 2023, she was sworn-in as attorney general, becoming the first black woman to hold the office and only the second black person to hold it, preceded only by Edward Brooke.

Early life and education

Campbell poses with Lois Savage, her aunt and mother-figure, on the day of her swearing-in as attorney general. With Campbell's birth mother deceased and her birth father imprisoned for much of her childhood, Savage and her husband played a major role in Campbell's upbringing.

Campbell and her twin brother Andre were born in Boston, Massachusetts. They have an older brother named Alvin Jr. Soon after she was born, her birth father, Alvin Campbell Sr., was sentenced to an eight year prison term. When Campbell was only eight-months-old, her birth mother, Roberta, was killed in a car accident while driving to visit Campbell's birth father in prison. This forced Campbell and her brothers to spend time residing in foster care and with various relatives. Campbell refers to Lois and Ron Savage, an aunt and uncle who played a major role in her upbringing, as being her parents (her "mom" and "dad"). Campbell did not know her birth father until she was eight, at which time he was released from prison.

Campbell was raised in the Roxbury and South End neighborhoods of Boston in an area that is a key black population and cultural center of the city. Over the course of her youth, Campbell attended five different schools within the Boston Public Schools system. Campbell graduated from Boston Latin School, an esteemed exam school in the city. While Campbell found academic success, by the time she was a high school student, both of her brothers had served prison sentences. For her undergrad post-secondary education, Campbell attended Princeton University. While she was attending Princeton, her birth father died, leaving her an orphan. Campbell graduated from Princeton in 2004. When Campbell was 29, her twin brother, who suffered from scleroderma, died while in state custody awaiting trial. Campbell has said that the cause of her brother's death is not known to her. Following her graduation from Princeton, Campbell enrolled at the UCLA School of Law where she would earn her J.D.

Early career

After graduating from UCLA School of Law, Campbell began her legal career by spending a year working as a staff attorney at EdLaw, a nonprofit in Roxbury that provided students and parents with free legal services pertaining to education rights and access to education. After this, Campbell spend two years at the Proskauer Rose legal firm where she provided advice to companies located in Boston and New York City on matters related to employment law and labor relations.

Campbell spend three months working as the interim general counsel for Boston's Metropolitan Area Planning Council. She later worked as deputy legal counsel to Governor Deval Patrick.

Boston City Council

First term

Campbell speaking in 2017

In the 2015 Boston City Council election, first-time candidate Campbell placed first in the 4th district's preliminary election and went on to defeat sixteen-term incumbent Charles Yancey in the general election with 61% of the vote. Campbell was the first woman to represent her council district.

Campbell was a supporter of voting "yes" on the Massachusetts Charter School Expansion Initiative referendum in 2016, a ballot measure which would have authorized an expansion of the number of charter schools in the state. Campbell was one of only two city councilors to vote against a resolution to voice the City Council's opposition to the ballot measure. The resolution overwhelmingly passed the council 11–2. Campbell faced criticisms from teachers' unions and progressive activists for supporting charter schools. The referendum wound up being heavily defeated by voters.

In 2016 Campbell and Councilor Ayanna Pressley introduced an ordinance that would have banned the use of credit scores by employers to negatively assess job applicants and existing hires.

Campbell supported the proposed federal Second Chance Reauthorization Act of 2015, which would have reauthorized the 2007 Second Chance Act. She introduced an ordinance to the Boston City Council to express support for this.

Second term and council presidency

Campbell was reelected in November 2017, having run unopposed. Campbell was one of two members of the Boston City Council not to give an endorsement in the coinciding 2017 Boston mayoral election. Besides Campbell, Ayanna Pressley remained neutral (citing her husband's employment by Mayor Walsh),Tito Jackson was running against Walsh, and the other ten city councilors endorsed Walsh's reelection campaign.

On December 9, 2017, Campbell announced that she had unanimous support of her colleagues to be the next president of the council. She was elected council president on January 1, 2018. Campbell was the first African-American woman to hold the position.

In 2019, as City Council president, Campbell proposed an ordinance to create a city inspector general. Mayor Marty Walsh came out in opposition to it. The ordinance was rejected by the City Council in a 9–4 vote. Also in 2019, Campbell and fellow councilor Matt O'Malley proposed the idea of a vacancy tax on abandoned residential and commercial properties.

Campbell promoted the idea of extending City Council terms from two years to four years in duration. She argued that longer terms would strengthen the City Council's power in city government and make it a more effective body. Such a proposal would require a home-rule petition to garner state consent. In February 2019, during hearings on this, Campbell proposed making further changes to city election laws, including creating a prohibition from running for more than one municipal office at the same time and changing the law so that special elections would be held to fill vacant at-large seats rather than the seat being offered to the first runner-up of the previous at-large election. This latter proposal notably came at a moment when Althea Garrison had just joined the Boston City Council to fill the at-large seat left vacant by Ayanna Pressley (who had resigned to join the U.S. House of Representatives) because Garrison had been the first runner-up in the 2017 at-large Boston City Council election. Campbell denied that her proposal was in response to Garrison, instead claiming it came from a belief that giving a seat to someone who had not outright won election to it is undemocratic. Campbell, ultimately, did not combine these ideas into a single petition. She separated them into two different petitions. One petition, which passed the City Council 11–2, requested that the state allow the city to extend Boston City Council term limits to four years. Campbell introduced a separate petition to hold special elections to fill vacant at-large seats.

Campbell endorsed Kamala Harris's campaign in the 2020 Democratic Party presidential primaries.

In April 2018, during her City Council presidency, Boston magazine ranked Campbell 51st on its list of the "100 Most Influential People in Boston". The magazine wrote that political insiders anticipated a continued political ascent for Campbell. She was one of only three city councilors included in these rankings, joined by Ayanna Pressley (ranked 20th after having won a upset primary election victory that made her poised to be elected to the U.S. House of Representatives) and Michelle Wu (ranked 31st). At the end of Campbell's council presidency, Milton J. Valencia of The Boston Globe opined that during both Campbell's City Council presidency and the preceding tenure Michelle Wu as City Council president, the council had, "been, perhaps, the most aggressive in recent history in pushing reforms, often to the left of the mayor, on issues addressing climate change and economic and racial equity."

Third term

Campbell won reelection to the council in November 2019. She was succeeded as president by Kim Janey in January 2020.

In June 2020, Campbell was one of the five city councilors in the minority that voted against Mayor Walsh's $3.61 billion operating budget proposal. She argued that it failed to include changes necessary for the city to address its racial inequality and systemic racism. That month, when Walsh announced the creation of a philanthropic fund focused on racial inequities, Campbell was somewhat critical. While she supported the creation of the fund itself and acknowledged that she believed philanthropy could play an important role, she argued that it was more important for the city to focus its own budget on such problems. Campbell was also critical of Walsh's coinciding move to create a new cabinet position within his administration dedicated to query and inclusion, considering it a "duplicative position" and criticizing Walsh for not instead other "actionable ideas" to "transform inequitable systems" that had been proposed to Walsh by her and others.

In July 2020, amid the George Floyd protests, Campbell proposed an ordinance to create a police oversight board. Ultimately, the Boston City Council voted later that year to approve a different ordinance creating an Office of Police Accountability that features a civilian police review board and oversight panel for internal affairs, which Mayor Walsh signed into law.

In 2021, Campbell and fellow councilor Kim Janey proposed an ordinance that would have banned almost all employers in Boston from running credit checks on job seekers, arguing that credit checks are most detrimental to low-income applicants.

In April 2021, in her capacity as chair of the public safety committee, Campbell refused to push forward $1.2 million in proposed grants for the Boston Police Department. Amid this, she engaged in a social media conflict with the account of the Boston Police Patrolmen's Association, which had issued criticism of Campbell.

In May 2021, the City Council passed an ordinance by Campbell and Ricardo Arroyo which limits the use of crowd control weapons by officers of the Boston Police Department. Acting Mayor Kim Janey signed the ordinance into law. Another such ordinance authored by Campbell and Arroyo had previously been passed by the City Council in December 2020, but had been vetoed by Mayor Marty Walsh in January 2021.

Pressley voiced opposition to the police department's use of exams which she contended were "biased" in order to weigh promotions of officers. She criticized Acting Mayor Janey for her initial defense of such exams. After Janey changed her position, Campbell criticized her for being late to address the matter.

As of January 2020^[update], Campbell served on several council committees, including Community Preservation Act, Public Safety & Criminal Justice, Rules and Administration, and Whole.

Campbell did not run for reelection to the council in 2021, as she instead opted to run for mayor.

2021 mayoral campaign

Mayoral campaign logo

On September 24, 2020, Campbell announced her candidacy in the 2021 Boston mayoral election from her childhood home in Roxbury. In an announcement video that was released, she declared, "I'm running for mayor, because every neighborhood deserves real change and a real chance." Campbell's mayoral campaign launch followed the launch of her council colleague Michelle Wu's own campaign for mayor earlier that month.

During her campaign, Campbell was critical of Acting Mayor Kim Janey, who was also a candidate in the election. Campbell worked to illustrate a strong contrast between herself and Janey. Campbell held press conferences criticizing Janey on various topics, including urging her to release legal documents related to a police scandal and to make greater cuts to the city's police department budget. In early August, Campbell called for Janey to put in place rules which would require that many businesses require patrons provide proof of vaccination. Campbell also criticized Janey for having, per her criticism, waited too long to put in place a vaccine mandate for city employees.

Campbell received the endorsement of The Boston Globe's editorial board.

Campbell's campaign platform included a proposal to reallocate ten percent of the Boston Police Department's budget ($50 million) to other programs matters related to public health, economic justice, and youth issues. She also proposed removing the Boston Public Schools' 125 school resource officers and reutilizing those funds to pay for more mental health specialists.

Ahead of the primary election, a super PAC associated with UNITE HERE Local 26, supporting Kim Janey's candidacy, ran a negative radio advertisement against Campbell which attacked her past support for charter school expansion, and which alleged that Campbell was "supported by special interests that want to take money from our schools, and give it to other schools that discriminate against kids with special needs". The latter accusation was seen as alluding to the fact that a super PAC supporting Campbell's candidacy received funding from wealthy charter school proponents, such as Reed Hastings. Campbell publicly took issue with the characterization of her in this ad, and urged Janey to disavow it, which Janey did not. Janey's campaign manager accused Campbell of being a hypocrite, characterizing Campbell's campaign as being entirely, "based on negative political attacks on Mayor Janey".

Campbell delivered a concession speech on the night of the nonpartisan mayoral primary, despite extremely little of the vote having yet been officially reported. Once the votes were counted, Campbell had finished third in the primary, meaning that she did not advance to the general election.

Following her loss, Campbell stated that she would have a publicly transparent process in contemplating which general election candidate (Annissa Essaibi George or Michelle Wu) to endorse, if any. She stated that she would seek firm commitments to the Black community to be made by any candidate she might endorsed. She ultimately gave no endorsement to either remaining candidate.

Attorney general of Massachusetts

2022 campaign

Logo for Campbell's 2022 attorney general campaign

On February 2, 2022, Campbell announced her candidacy for Massachusetts Attorney General in the 2022 election. Campbell's announcement came after incumbent Attorney General Maura Healey announced that she would not seek reelection and run for governor of Massachusetts instead.

Campbell's inclusion on the ballot for the election's Democratic primary made her the first black woman in the history of Massachusetts to qualify for inclusion on the ballot for a statewide election. Healey endorsed Campbell in August, prior to the primary election. Campbell won the Democratic nomination and, in the general election, was elected to serve as attorney general. She is the first black woman to hold the office, and the second black person to hold the office, after only Edward Brooke. Other focuses of her platform included addressing public safety as well as housing-related matters.

As a candidate, Campbell pledged to approach the position through what she dubbed an "equity lens". She pledged that she would use the office to address matters such as disparities of health and economics negatively impacting the rural parts of the state prison reform, and juvenile justice. She promised that she would seek to ensure that nobody would be treated as "above the law". She also promised to revive public faith in the criminal justice system. Campbell made criminal justice reform a focus of her candidacy. Campbell also made addressing police misconduct one of the focuses of her campaign. Among the positions she staked out was a promise to end the practice of qualified immunity. Campbell's Republican opponent, Jay McMahon, attempted to paint her as being "soft" on crime.

Tenure

Campbell (far right) taking her oath of office as attorney general

Campbell took office on January 18, 2023. Her swearing-in ceremony took place at the Boston Convention and Exhibition Center. Campbell has said that she views primary role for the office of attorney general as being to serve as the "people's lawyer". Campbell's husband, Matthew Schier, held the Bible upon which she took her oath.

In March 2023, Campbell threatened legal action against Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority municipalities that were not adhering to the transit-oriented housing policy of the MBTA Communities Zoning Law.

While Campbell stands by her personal opposition to qualified immunity, within months of taking office she had backed away from her promise of ending it, viewing such a pursuit as detrimental to the working relationship her office needs to maintain with law enforcement officials.

On April 4, 2023 Campbell spoke to the state legislature to request that the state's upcoming budget fund the creation of four new departments under the Office of the Attorney General: a Reproductive Justice Unit, an Elder Justice Unit, a Gun Violence Prevention Unit and a Police Accountability Unit.

In a June 2023 filing with the Massachusetts Department of Public Utilities, Campbell advised that it would be wiser to grant only a much smaller procurement of offshore wind power than Governor Healey had requested approval from the Department to procure. Campbell argued that the a 20-year contract to procure energy should be for a smaller amount of power than Healey was proposing, arguing that it was unwise to make an agreement for larger purchase at a time when prices for offshore wind power had increased.

Personal life

Campbell was born in Boston. Her mother and father died when she was at a young age; she refers to an aunt and uncle as her parents. By the time Campbell was a high school student, both of Campbell's brothers had served prison sentences. When she was 29, her twin brother, who suffered from scleroderma, died while in state custody awaiting trial.

Campbell has often discussed traumas such as the death of her mother, childhood absence of her father, and her experience in foster care, as well as her twin brother's life story. Campbell once remarked to a reporter from The Associated Press,

One thing I do frequently is share my story because I think there are so many who carry their story with a sense of shame and don’t want to talk about it, including the criminal aspects of my family. But there is no shame in one sharing their story. There is power in it.

Campbell has credited family members, teachers, and employers with helping her to find a path to success. Throughout her political career, she has cited her family's experience with inequity and the criminal justice system, particularly her twin brother's life experience, as impacting her views and priorities.

Campbell's is married to Matthew Scheier. She and her husband have two sons. Campbell lives in the Mattapan neighborhood of Boston.

Electoral history

City Council

2015 Boston City Council 4th district election
Candidate	Primary election		General election
	Votes	%	Votes	%
Andrea Campbell	1,982	57.92	4,311	61.32
Charles Yancey (incumbent)	1,159	33.87	2,701	38.42
Terrance J. Williams	217	6.34
Jovan J. Lacet	60	1.75
all others	4	0.12	18	0.26
Total	3,422	100	7,030	100

write-in votes

Mayor

Attorney General

Commentaries and op-eds authored

• "Is Boston's Booming Economy Making Our City Better Or Destroying It? The Truth Lies Somewhere In Between", WBUR, February 13, 2020.
• "What The Pandemic Is Doing To My Boston Neighborhood", WBUR, April 24, 2020.
• "We Can't Make Sweeping Structural Change If Our Leaders Don't Understand Racial Equity", WBUR, June 4, 2020 by
• "Boston needs to take more decisive measures on COVID-19", The Boston Globe, August 19, 2021.
• "How will mayoral candidates address inequities and empower Black Bostonians?", The Boston Globe, Sseptember 24, 2021.