Maria Lopes
US community activist, Democratic Party member of the Rhode Island House of Representatives from 1989 to 2001
Maria J. Lopes is an American community activist and former politician who was the first African-American woman elected to the Rhode Island House of Representatives, serving from 1989 to 2001. A Cape Verdean American, she represented East Providence as a Democrat.
Life and career
Of Cape Verdean descent, Lopes lived in the Wanskuck district of Providence, Rhode Island. Married to a firefighter, she became an activist after Mayor Joseph Doorley sought to sell the Valley View housing project, where she lived, to a private developer that planned to convert the property into luxury apartments. Lopes organized 400 residents and supporters to occupy the Providence City Council chambers in protest on May 29, 1973, and helped to coordinate a lawsuit that led to the Rhode Island Supreme Court halting the sale of the Valley View property. Doorley lost the 1974 election, and Lopes became active in the fair housing movement and the Tenant Affairs Board, which she served as vice chair and president.
Lopes was elected to a seat in the Rhode Island House of Representatives in November 1988 and took office in early 1983, representing the 83rd House District as a Democrat. She was the first Black woman elected to the Rhode Island General Assembly. In September 1983, Lopes reached an agreement with mayor Buddy Cianci to permit Valley View to be sold to a private developer but maintain 25% of the apartments as Section 8 housing.
Lopes lost her Democratic primary election in 2000 and left office in 2001.
Begin with the source’s own compact description: “Maria Lopes” is uS community activist, Democratic Party member of the Rhode Island House of Representatives from 1989 to 2001. The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through Maria, Lopes and community, not as a finished interpretation.
Why this record matters
The phrase “uS community activist, Democratic Party member of the Rhode Island House of Representatives from 1989 to 2001” supplies a clear boundary for inquiry. It also exposes the unanswered questions: who defined that boundary, when it became stable and which sources sit outside it.
The strongest evidence will usually combine a dated visual record with documents produced by the authority responsible for the place. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jul 23, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q123924759. None of the 1 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1989, 2001, 1973 and 1974.
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This entry incorporates text from “Maria Lopes” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.