Andrea Joy Campbell is an American lawyer and politician who has served as the 45th attorney general of Massachusetts since 2023. A member of the Democratic Party, she previously served on the Boston City Council from 2016 to 2022, serving as council president from 2018 to 2020. She unsuccessfully ran for mayor of Boston in 2021, placing third in the nonpartisan primary 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 ballot access for statewide office in Massachusetts. Winning the Democratic Party's nomination with a sizable victory 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 by Edward Brooke.
Early life and education
Campbell and her twin brother, Andre, were born in Boston, Massachusetts. She has 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, Denise, was killed in a car accident while driving to visit Campbell's birth father in prison. As a result, Campbell and her brothers resided in foster care and with various relatives. Among the relatives Campbell lived with were her grandmother, an alcoholic, as well as her aunt and uncle Lois and Ron Savage. The Savages played a major role in her upbringing, and Campbell refers to them as being her parents. Campbell did not know her birth father until she was eight, at which time he was released from prison and she and her siblings began living with him.
Campbell was raised in the Roxbury and South End neighborhoods of Boston in a majority Black area. Over the course of her youth, she attended five different schools within the Boston Public Schools system. Shell graduated from Boston Latin School. By the time she was a high school student, both of her brothers had served prison sentences.
Campbell attended Princeton University for college. While she was 19 years of age and 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 received her J.D. degree.
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 spent 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 spent 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 (2016 and 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 (2018 and 2019) 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.
After the chaotic right-wing "Straight Pride Parade" event held in Boston in 2019, Campbell called on the city to reassess its approval process for public event permits. Campbell was critical of the event and the public resources that went to providing crowd control and security around it, writing, "while I am a firm believer in free speech, I’m not okay with wasting tens of thousands of taxpayer dollars for a group to come into Boston from out of state to create chaos and spread hate."
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 an 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 (2020 and 2021) 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 equity and inclusion, considering it a "duplicative position" and criticizing Walsh for not instead implementing 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. Campbell contrasted the union's vocal criticism of her with the union's failure to comment on the former child abuse allegations made against a past president of the police union.
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.
Campbell 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.
, Campbell served on several council committees, including Community Preservation Act, Public Safety & Criminal Justice, Rules and Administration, and Whole.