CNN
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As Dejuana Thompson watched Vice President Kamala Harris become the first Black woman to be nominated for president by a major party at the convention in Chicago last month, she was overcome with a wave of emotions.
“I was overcome with what I can only describe as pride in my ancestors,” said Thompson, who lives in Birmingham, Alabama.
But “literally two seconds later,” she said, reality sunk in. “I thought, ‘Lord, we have a job to do.'”
Harris’ historic candidacy has sparked a wave of activism among Black women like Thompson across the country, who have long been a key part of the Democratic coalition but are now working overtime to push for the nomination of a woman of their own ancestry. On Thursday night, Oprah Winfrey, in collaboration with the group Win With Black Women, is set to host a massive virtual rally aimed at bringing together groups of Harris supporters to urge them to get out to vote. Harris is expected to attend.
Organizers say tens of thousands of people have already registered interest in the “Unite for America” livestream, which will take place across multiple platforms from YouTube to Twitch. The event, which begins at 8pm ET on Thursday, is an outgrowth of a Zoom meeting hosted by Win With Black Women within hours of President Joe Biden ending his reelection bid on July 21.
The event, whose attendance quickly swelled to more than 90,000 between Zoom participants and those watching via other means, was an early and powerful show of Black women’s support for Harris’ historic candidacy.
“There’s been a really clear recognition that this is a historic election,” Jotaka Eadie, founder of Win with Black Women, told CNN.
Groups led by black women are also launching new political efforts to support Harris. Alpha Kappa Alpha, the historically black sorority that Harris joined while at Howard University, recently launched its first political action committee. Delta Sigma Theta, another black sorority, is running its first-ever get-out-the-vote ad campaign, with commercials that will run through September. Meanwhile, the National Council of Black Women is working with its affiliate chapters and dozens of affiliated groups, including the black youth organization Jack & Jill of America, to register black women and young voters ages 17 to 24.
“When someone like me becomes a top candidate, the impact is different,” said Dahlia Dawson, executive director of the voter mobilization group America Vote and the first African-American woman to lead the group. “There’s a new sense of urgency.”
Hillary Holley, a veteran of Stacey Abrams’ failed campaign to become Georgia’s first Black and first female governor, now runs Care in Action, the political arm of the National Domestic Workers Alliance.
Ms. Harris’ rise to the top of the Democratic field has dramatically changed the outlook for activists on the ground and the donors who support their efforts, Holley said.
Before Biden dropped out of the race, Holley, who lives and works in Georgia, invited donors to a meeting in Atlanta on Aug. 8, where she gave a pep talk reminding even those less enthusiastic about the president’s campaign of the importance of the election.
But once Harris emerged as the party’s standard-bearer, interest in the event soared, Holley said: The 80 donors, all but a few of whom were black women, gathered in the basement of a southwest Atlanta home and were suddenly eager to do more.
“Black women have stood up for years, for decades, election after election, and led the Democratic Party to victory,” Holley said, “because we knew we had to get out there and take care of our communities.”
“Now we have the best of both worlds,” she added. “We can do it because of a woman who deeply understands our struggles. We’ve been waiting for this moment.”
Holly said her group’s election budget has jumped to $15 million, up from an initial goal of about $9 million. Care in Action now plans to reach 6.8 million voters in Arizona, Georgia, Nevada and North Carolina, with the goal of getting women of color, who are already registered to vote in those states but often miss elections, to turn out to the polls.
But Holley and other activists said their case to voters transcends Harris’s identity. Care in Action activists — who include nannies, housekeepers and other care workers — are focused on “economic freedom” and plan to point to Harris’ economic proposals in persuading voters to support her in the coming weeks, Holley said.
Black women are one of the most reliable Democratic voting demographics, with exit polls showing 90% of them backing Biden in the 2020 presidential election. Support for Democratic presidential candidates among black women soared to 96% in 2012, the last time Obama ran.
“The secret of black women is not just about us, but how we motivate and influence,” says veteran activist Melanie Campbell, chair of the Power of the Ballot Action Fund. “We get our men involved, our sons, our daughters, our nieces, our nephews.”
In 2020, Campbell was one of several Black women who urged Biden to choose an African-American female running mate, and was one of several who publicly urged him to continue his campaign after his poor performance in the June 27 debate.
Campbell said she was worried Democrats would move to ignore the vice president if Biden dropped out of the race. The message from Black women was, “No, she got the 14 million (primary) votes that he got,” Campbell said. “It was Biden-Harris.”
And on Biden’s final day on the campaign trail, tens of thousands of people tuned into Win With Black Women’s regular Sunday night Zoom call to cheer on the vice president, highlighting the growing support for Harris among black women, said Steve Phillips, a veteran Democratic strategist and donor.
“Black women lined this up,” he said.
A Win With Black Women rally on July 21 raised $1.5 million in about three hours, said Eadie, the group’s founder, who said $20 million has been raised so far by a series of grassroots groups supporting Harris’ campaign. (These groups include White Dudes for Harris, Win With Black Men and Swifties for Kamala, which have been invited to join Harris and Winfrey at a virtual rally on Thursday.)
In North Carolina, where Donald Trump won by about 74,000 votes out of about 5.4 million votes in the 2020 election, groups led by black women are moving all over the state, competing to expand the electorate. Black people make up about 21% of the state’s population, and North Carolina is home to nearly a dozen historically black colleges and universities.
Thompson, an Alabama activist, is the founder of Woke Vote, the group that helped elect Doug Jones the state’s first Democratic senator in a quarter century in 2017. In this election, her work is focused on a handful of states, including North Carolina and Georgia, where Biden won by fewer than 12,000 votes in 2020.
North Carolina was Trump’s narrowest victory four years ago, and Harris is trying to become the first Democratic presidential candidate to win the state since Barack Obama in 2008. Thompson, who worked on Obama’s 2008 campaign in North Carolina, said she is focused on boosting turnout among rural black voters in the eastern part of the state, who are often overlooked in traditional election campaigns.
Black women activists in the state are also reaching far beyond their peers.
Janice Robinson is the North Carolina program director for the relationship-building organizing group Red Wine & Blue, which has been reaching out to various suburban women’s groups across North Carolina to mobilize their friends, neighbors and relatives to vote for Harris and other Democrats.
On a recent Friday morning at a Charlotte-area house party, as about a dozen people, mostly white women, gathered with Robinson to strategize over coffee, pastries and orange juice, she held up her phone to explain how to use a tool to share election information with other North Carolinians in her contacts list.
“People listen to people they trust,” she emphasized.
Her goal is to get 40,000 voters to the polls in North Carolina.
Meanwhile, America Vote’s North Carolina chapter is working with a variety of other groups to reach out to 4 million voters in the state, a record four times the reach of any previous election, said Ashley Blue, the group’s state director.
Deputy Director Nelvana Crews is a veteran of North Carolina’s presidential campaigns, who walked so many miles canvassing and leafleting for Hillary Clinton in the 2016 election that she developed a cyst on her right foot. Crews said she “worked overtime” in that election in part to honor her grandmother, Mary Starkey, a staunch Democratic activist from Delaware who had a strong desire to vote for Clinton to become the first woman president of the United States, but who passed away in 2015.
This election cycle, Crews’ nonpartisan day job has her primarily focused on increasing voter turnout rather than working directly for candidates, but she said her determination to make history in the presidential election remains unchanged.
“At the end of the day, it’s not right to blame black women for not doing their jobs,” she said. “If we’re not successful this time, it’s not because we didn’t try our best.”