Terri Sewell

Biography & Campaign Analysis

Background

Terri Sewell, whose full name is Terrycina Andrea Sewell, was born in Huntsville, Alabama, to Andrew A. Sewell, a former high school basketball coach, and Nancy Gardner Sewell, a retired high school librarian who was the first Black woman elected to Selma's city council.

She was the first Black valedictorian of Selma High School and the first Selma High School graduate to attend an Ivy League school.

After graduating from Princeton University in 1986, she studied at St Hilda's College, Oxford, as a Marshall Scholar and graduated with a degree in political science in 1988. Her Oxford thesis was later published as the book Black Tribunes: Race and Representation in British Politics (1993).

She completed her Juris Doctor at Harvard Law School in 1992.

Career

After law school, Terri Sewell served as a judicial law clerk in Birmingham to Chief Judge U. W. Clemon and, starting in 1994, worked in New York at Davis Polk & Wardwell as a securities lawyer. She returned to Alabama in 2004 and became a public finance lawyer at Maynard, Cooper & Gale, where she was the first Black woman partner.

In 2010, after four-term Democratic incumbent Artur Davis gave up the 7th district seat to run for governor, Sewell finished first in the four-way Democratic primary with 36.8% of the vote, defeated Jefferson County Commissioner Sheila Smoot with 55% in the runoff, and won the general election against Republican Don Chamberlain with 72.4%.

She is the first African-American woman elected to Congress from Alabama. In the 119th Congress she serves on the Committee on Ways and Means and the Committee on House Administration, where she is ranking member of the Subcommittee on Elections, and she is vice chair of the New Democrat Coalition.

2026 race

Terri Sewell is the Democratic nominee in the 2026 election for Alabama's 7th congressional district, which covers the west-central part of the state in the Black Belt, including Demopolis, Greensboro and Selma, along with majority-black areas of Birmingham and Tuscaloosa.

Sewell, the incumbent, was re-elected with 63.7% of the vote in 2024. Under the legislature-approved redistricted map, the 7th district gained Monroe and Conecuh counties from the 1st district and ceded Lowndes County to the 2nd district.

Sewell was the Democratic nominee in both the nonbinding primary and the special Democratic primary. In the November 3, 2026, general election she faces Republican Ammie Akin, an educator who won the special Republican primary with 73.4% of the vote against David Perry.