Gilchrist got into politics two years ago, after he tried to vote in the 2016 election, had a problem with his ballot at the local library, and was urged by the people around him to run for city clerk in Detroit to address those same access issues. He lost, but ended up making a big enough impression that Gretchen Whitmer picked him as her running mate over the summer, making him the first African American elected to the job in Michigan.* Not far away, Mandela Barnes, a 31-year-old former community organizer from Milwaukee, was elected lieutenant governor after two terms in the state assembly.

In public and in interviews, many of these new elected officials talk about the larger historical legacy they’re part of, and what policy problems they want to tackle now that they’ve won. “There is definitely the sense that there is a certain weight that comes with it,” Barnes said, referring to the responsibility of being elected in this moment as a young black leader. “And I accept it.”

They also talk about the racism and bias, implicit and explicit, that they faced during their campaigns. Barnes’s opponent suggested that he had kneeled during the national anthem when he hadn’t. Antonio Delgado, who took a GOP-held House seat in New York, is a Rhodes scholar with a Harvard Law degree who was tagged as a “big-city rapper” in campaign ads because of an album he put out in 2007. A negative ad about Aaron Ford, the Nevada state Senate majority leader who won the attorney general’s race there, questioned his qualifications and focused on charges he’d incurred for public intoxication while in college.

Ford said he hoped his election would help other black would-be candidates see past the “fear of making yourself vulnerable to your community, and to the voters.” But the attacks still clearly stung—he brought up the hits on his qualifications unprompted, and pointed out that he has five degrees, including a doctorate, and has been practicing law for 17 years.

“It would be naive not to think that implicit bias and implicit prejudice still don’t exist here. They definitely do,” Ford said. “I would hope that there is not a large segment of the population, but there is a segment of the population that has an aversion to voting for someone who looks different or comes from a different background than they do.”

Ford and others in the new class of African American leaders stressed that they don’t want to be known as the black attorney general or lieutenant governor or member of Congress. And they also emphasized the importance of bringing additional, needed perspectives into conversations around issues with particular resonance for many African Americans, such as criminal-justice reform and economic inequality.

“We don’t want policy to be made about us; we want policy to be made for us and by us,” said Juliana Stratton, who was elected lieutenant governor in Illinois.