How 44,000 Black Women Galvanized Support for Kamala Harris on Sunday Night
(Bloomberg) -- Some of America’s most prominent Black women across politics, business and entertainment joined thousands of their peers on a Sunday night Zoom call to galvanize support for Vice President Kamala Harris, raising $1.5 million in just three hours.
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Some 44,000 Black women, including Representative Maxine Waters of California, one of the most senior Black women in Congress, and other lawmakers including Joyce Beatty and Jasmine Crockett, talked of rallying behind Harris for the US presidential election against Donald Trump this November.
Reverend Bernice King, daughter of civil-rights leader Martin Luther King Jr. and chief executive officer of The King Center, said that while she had been voting since she was 18, she had never endorsed a candidate publicly, until now.
“I’m 100% in her corner, I’m going to be very strategic in the way that I move forward,” King said on the call.
Win With Black Women, a political advocacy group that organized the call, later said it raised $1.5 million in three hours for Harris’ election campaign, joining a rush of other donations as Democrats raised more than $50 million online Sunday after President Joe Biden said he wouldn’t run for reelection.
Biden’s decision to step aside and endorse Harris could pose a threat to the Trump campaign. Polls had shown Black voters, who overwhelmingly supported Biden during the 2020 election, had been moving away from the Democratic party following concerns about inflation, slow progress on civil-rights issues and the president’s support for Israel in the war in Gaza. Trump, meanwhile, had sought to make gains with Black voters.
For LaTosha Brown, co-founder of Black Voters Matter, Harris is exactly what the Democrats needed. Biden had failed to get voters on the ground excited, but that's now changed, she said, adding she will now be campaigning for the vice president and making clear that Harris is her candidate of choice.
‘Excited and Ignited’
“We needed a shot in the arm, something to activate us,” Brown said in an interview. “I'm now both excited and ignited.”
Others on the call included former Democratic National Committee chair Donna Brazile, Washington, DC mayor Muriel Bowser and Maryland’s First Lady Dawn Moore. Maryland governor Wes Moore later issued a statement supporting Harris’ candidacy.
Representative Beatty, a Democrat representing Ohio in Congress, urged attendees to use their platforms to rally support for Harris in their communities. “We come with a strong message because we’re in the fight, we’re on this journey, we realize the magnitude of this moment,” she said.
The huge attendance for the call meant that organizers had to ask Zoom Video Communications Inc. to extend the capacity limit for the meeting, which the video conferencing company was able to do for the customer.Win With Black Women organizers didn’t immediately respond to requests for comment. Bloomberg News reviewed a stream of the call that was posted to the social media platform X.
--With assistance from Brody Ford.
(Updates with LaTosha Brown comment from seventh paragraph)
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