Andrea Campbell

Andrea Joy Campbell 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.

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.

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.

A member of the Democratic Party, she was first elected to the council in November 2015 and assumed office in January 2016.

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 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.

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.

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.

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, 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.

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.

While Campbell performed well academically, 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 attending Princeton, her birth father died, leaving her an orphan.