Brenda Frazier

Brenda L. Strong Frazier (born 1941) is an American politician and activist. Born in Shelby, North Carolina, Frazier and her family moved to Allegheny County, Pennsylvania, in 1943. She received a bachelor's degree in elementary education at Indiana University of Pennsylvania and began working as an elementary school teacher in Pittsburgh. She joined the First Pittsburgh chapter of the National Organization for Women (NOW) in 1975 and helped to found the East End chapter of the organization, which required the election of two presidents: one white and one Black. She served as chair of NOW's national minority women's committee.

Frazier was elected to the Allegheny County Council for District 13 in 2001 as a Democrat. She founded and chaired the Allegheny County Black Elected Officials organization. She was re-elected in 2004 and 2008, although she resigned her position on February 11, 2008, to run for a seat in the Pennsylvania House of Representatives. She lost the Democratic primary to Dom Costa. Following the unsuccessful election, she joined the Pennsylvania Democratic Committee and founded the organization's Black caucus.

Early life Frazier was born in 1941 in Shelby, North Carolina. Her father worked during World War II in steel mills before taking a job with a railroad company and opening a dry cleaning business. Her mother was a teacher who often had a difficult time finding work as a result of her gender and race. She was the eldest of eight children and her family moved to Whitaker, Pennsylvania, in 1943 where they lived in segregated public housing. Frazier attended Homestead High School and Braddock High School. She graduated with a bachelor's degree in elementary education from the Indiana University of Pennsylvania. She returned to teaching between 1988 and 1997, when her children were older. She said in 2009 that "[she] didn't want to stop fighting racism to fight against sexism".

Frazier was appointed as one of the chairs of the National NOW Task Force on Minority Women in the late 1970s, alongside Jackie Washington and Val Cafee, and she organized a national task force on Black feminism. She served on the board of the Pennsylvania branch and national organization.

She was a board member of the Pittsburgh Partnership for Neighborhood Development and vice president of the North Side Community Leadership Fund. She endorsed Democrat John Kerry in the 2004 presidential election. She is also a supporter of LGBT rights and the ERA.

Political career Frazier was elected to the Allegheny County Council for District 13 in 2001, taking over the two year remainder of Tom Foerster's term in office following his death. She ran as a Democrat but lost out on the party's endorsement to Robert Biel, which the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette reported was likely due to her connections with Republican Jim Roddey, who was serving as the county's chief executive. Frazier had been appointed by Roddey to his transition team. She received 4,735 votes in the Democratic primary on May 15, 2001, beating Biel with 3,955 votes, Richard Stahl with 3,058 votes, Vernon L. Boozer with 828 votes, and Daniel Styche with 453 votes. She was the first Black woman elected to the county council following its establishment as a home-rule government the year prior and one of three members of the fifteen-person council who was not a white man. Frazier served as chair of the organization that she founded, the Allegheny County Black Elected Officials. She chaired the health and human services committee of the county council and was a member of the appointment review, budget and finance, economic development, government relations, and campaign reforms committees. In both elections, she was not endorsed by a political party but won the Democratic primary and the general election. In 2007, she was the co-sponsor of a rule change to add term limits for volunteers serving on county boards. The same year, she ran for re-election against Matthew Arena, who won the endorsement of the Democratic Party. He challenged Frazier's nominating petition in the court of common pleas, a case which was unsuccessful but which he appealed to the Commonwealth Court.

Frazier resigned from the County Council on February 11, 2008, to run for a seat in the Pennsylvania House of Representatives. She contested the 21st district in the seat vacated by Lisa Bennington. She was opposed by HosPAC, a political group consisting of members of the hospitality industry, who campaigned against Frazier as a result of her vote in favor of a 10 percent tax on poured drinks in Allegheny County. The formation of the East End chapter of NOW and the committee to Counter the Klan were honored in an exhibit entitled 'Strength in the Struggle: Civil Rights' at the August Wilson Center, which included photographs of the chapter's founders. Frazier was interviewed in 2009 for In Sisterhood: The Women's Movement in Pittsburgh, a multimedia project on local feminists in the 1970s and 1980s run by Patricia Ulbrich. She was honored on February 28, 2015, at a Black History Month dinner hosted by Classic Events, a public relations firm in Wilkinsburg, Pennsylvania.