Erika Stotts Pearson, a businesswoman and charter school founder, is running for election to the U.S. House to represent the 8th Congressional District in Tennessee. She won the Democratic primary and faces Republican challenger David Kustoff in November.
The roots run deep for Erika in northwest Tennessee. She is the descendant of a family who, even before Reconstruction, owned land and hired black and white sharecroppers who worked together on that land, then built the first one room schoolhouse and the first church, Philadelphia Baptist Church, in their town.
Erika’s great-great-grandfather established Edenton Farms on the family land in the 1830s. Charlie Edenton had studied with George Washington Carver and learned techniques he would eventually bring back to the 495-acre farm that, along with the church, still exists in Fayette County, Tennessee. For decades, the Stotts family contributed so much to the area and its people that one of the many honors received was having a local bridge named after Mr. Edenton.
Her family history is replete with many accomplished African Americans, including a cousin, Carl Stotts, who was the first black Fire Chief of the Memphis Fire Department, another cousin, Rita Stotts, who was a federal judge, a mother who spent 44 years as an educator in the Memphis City school district and a grandmother who is first cousin to activist Angela Davis.
Erika attended the University of Memphis and the University of Massachusetts earning multiple degrees in Economics, Finance, and Engineering, but it was her Master of Science in Sport and Leisure Commerce that she immediately put to use with her own sports agency, Pro Vision Sports. While in Massachusetts, she met the wife of Stanley Morgan. Morgan, who played 20 seasons with the New England Patriots, and his wife owned a little boutique Erika frequented. Morgan’s wife was determined to introduce Erika to her husband.
“His wife talked to me every day and said, my husband is starting a firm; I know you have your own firm, but I’m pushing for a woman to get into that firm. So, when I finally met her husband he said, I had to hear pillow talk about you every night!”
She merged her company with what would eventually become MidSouth Sports.
“I was the only female agent assigned to basketball and football which was really, really exciting. Coming into the sports program . . . I had to manage a women’s professional basketball team, which would be the precursor to the ABL.”
The ABL, or American Basketball League, started in 1996 and was the first independent professional basketball league for women in the United States.
When asked how she became interested in owning a sports agency at a time when not many blacks, much less black women, were involved in the industry, she said her Mom was an athlete at Tennessee State University and had many friends who were Olympians, including the great Wilma Rudolph, whom she affectionately referred to as “Auntie Skeet.” She would listen to these women saying they felt their careers would fare better under a female agent.
Apparently not lacking confidence, even as a child, she thought, “I know I’m going to be an engineer, ‘cause that’s already in my DNA, but whatever that is you’re talking about, I think I can do that for you.”
Erika believes she won her primary so decisively this year because of her family name (which she was initially reluctant to use) and the effort she made running for the same seat in 2018.
Even though she won the primary, but lost the general election, she sees that race as a stepping-stone to an eventual win in 2020. She also sees her run for office as a much-needed example for black girls.
