Black female sheriff will be first in Texas
Jefferson County candidate had to win 3 contests
BEAUMONT — While history was being made with the election of Donald Trump as president, Zena Stephens was making a little of her own in Southeast Texas by becoming the state’s first black female sheriff.
And it took three elections to do it.
In the March primary, Stephens knocked out the incumbent sheriff’s chief deputy, who was the favorite of law enforcement and had significantly outraised Stephens. In May, she bested an African-American constable in a runoff. Then on Tuesday she narrowly defeated a 39-year retired Beaumont police lieutenant to become sheriff of Jefferson County.
According to the Sheriffs’ Association of Texas, which tracks the history of the office, Stephens is the first black woman elected
sheriff in the state.
After her victory, she acknowledged the significance of her success.
“I think it is important, because I never saw anybody who looked like me in this role, or as a police chief, when I was growing up,” said Stephens. “And so the idea, not just for girls but for any minority, that you can obtain these jobs at this level, I think that’s important. And it’s important for these jobs in law enforcement and any job to reflect the community they serve.”
Stephens said she has been the first “in a lot of things because I work in a male-dominated career path.”
Stephens, police chief at Prairie View A&M University for three years, was chief deputy when she left the Jefferson County Sheriff’s Department in 2013 after 16 years. She will replace Mitch Woods, who is retiring in January after 20 years.
When Prairie View hired Stephens as its first female police chief, Woods said he foresaw a distinguished career for her, with “bigger things to come later.”
Texas’s first female sheriff was Emma Susan Daugherty Banister, who took office in Coleman County in 1918 after her husband died three months before his term as sheriff ended.
Loving County lays claim to the first elected female sheriff in the state, Edna Reed Clayton Dewees.
According to the county’s sheriff ’s office, she was elected in 1945 and was known for never carrying a firearm and reporting only two arrests during her term.
Barbara Hayes Foreman was the first black female deputy sheriff in the state when she was appointed in 1977, according to Black Texas Women, a book published by the University of Texas Press in 1996. Foreman served in Travis County.
Throughout the campaign, Stephens credited strong local black candidates for engaging black voters.
“There was major interest,” she said after the primary election. “It drove African-Americans out to the polls.”
Stephens made national headlines when 19-yearold Adam Carver of Vidor allegedly fired a shot at her campaign headquarters the night before the March primary while shouting a racial slur. Carver was indicted in March on a charge of deadly conduct and is scheduled for a hearing on Nov. 28.
With more than 400 employees, the sheriff’s office is Jefferson County’s largest department. Its total budget of almost $41 million, of which almost $27 million goes to run the jail, is about one-third of the county’s general budget.
Stephens said that one of her first priorities after taking office will be to address concerns within the department.
“Generally, the people who work there are nervous anytime there’s a changing of the guard,” she said. “I want to get in there and make people feel normal again, and evaluate how we move forward.”