Black woman elected lieutenant governor in Kentucky

(Special from NorthStarNews Today) – Kentucky voters Tuesday elected Jenean Hampton, a Republican Tea Party candidate, lieutenant governor, making her the first African American to win a statewide office in the Blue Grass State.

Hampton, who was Governor-elect Matt Bevin’s running mate, defeated Democratic candidate Jack Conway and his running mate, Sannie Overly, by nine percent of the vote. Hampton and Bevin won 53 percent of the votes cast.

Hampton ran for the Kentucky house of representatives in 2014 but lost to the incumbent.

Prior to becoming involved in politics, she was a U.S. Air Force Captain, deployed to Saudi Arabia during Operation Desert Storm. She served as a computer systems officer.

Hampton grew up in Detroit and she worked five years in the automobile industry to pay for college.

She earned a degree in engineering in 1985 from Wayne State University. After serving in the Air Force, she earned an MBA from University of Rochester before moving to Bowling Green, Ky., where she worked for 19 years in a corrugated box factory. She became plant manager before losing her job in 2012.

At that point, she threw her hat into political ring.

She told the Louisville Courier Journal, the state’s largest newspaper, that she became a conservative to avoid peer pressure to fail in life.

She is one of two African-American lieutenant governors. The other is Boyd Rutherford of Maryland. Kip Holden, who is in a run-off in Louisiana on November 21, could quite possibly become the third.

This article originally published in the November 9, 2015 print edition of The Louisiana Weekly newspaper.